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: The Record--The Independent Newspaper at Harvard Law School
11-9-06
On Thursday, November 2, the American Constitution Society hosted a debate between Professor Mark Tushnet and historian Saul Cornell over the challenges and possibilities for progressive gun control policy.
Tushnet joined the Harvard Law School faculty this year as William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law after spending twenty-five years teaching at the Georgetown University Law Center. Cornell, an Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University and Director of the Second A
Source: Reuters
11-11-06
Top U.S. military leaders have begun a broad review of strategy in Iraq and other crisis areas in the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism, The New York Times reported in Saturday editions.
Citing Pentagon officials, the Times reported that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace had assembled a team of what it called some of the military's brightest and most innovative officers and charged them with taking a fresh look at Iraq, Afghanistan and other flashpoints.
Source: WaPo
11-11-06
The Greek capital hardly springs immediately to mind as the home for a shrine to the 19th-century Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.
But letters from Victor Hugo, Russian oil-field maps and explosives-factory share certificates will be among the items going on display next year in Athens in a new museum dedicated to Nobel, the museum's founder announced this week.
Greek historian Giorgos Marcou's family donated the funds for the project, and boug
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN's Cliopatria (blog)
11-10-06
Recipients of the National Humanities Medal this morning in the Oval Office at the White House include: Fouad Ajami, the Middle Eastern Studies scholar, Washington, DC; James Buchanan, an economist, Fairfax, VA; Nickolas Davatzes, president and ceo emeritus of A&E Entertainment, Wilton, CT; Robert Fagles, translator and classicist, Princeton, NJ; The Hoover Institution (John Raisian, Senior Fellow and Director of Hoove
Source: Jeffrey R. Young in the Chronicle of Higher Education
11-10-06
Historians are great at telling stories, but they're lousy at pictures, asserts Edward L. Ayers, a history professor and dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.
While other disciplines have found ways to represent complex phenomena using illustrations that overlay many types of information, Mr. Ayers says, history has for the most part focused on written narratives, linear stories that set forth an overriding argument. But since
Source: Dr. History (blog)
11-11-06
[I am an associate professor of history at a small liberal arts college in the South. I teach both sections of U.S. Survey and upper division level courses in post-Civil War American history, women's history, and American foreign policy. I have two young children and I just got tenure.]
I was pretty shocked by the news that Donald Rumsfeld is resigning as Secretary of Defense, but that doesn't come close to matching my shock that his replacement could be current Texas A&M president and
Source: David Horowitz at FrontPageMag.com
11-10-06
Bettina Aptheker is a well-known American radical who in the 1960s was a leader of the campus Left, and now, like so many of her peers, is a tenured activist on the faculty of a major university. Her father, Herbert Aptheker, was the Communist Party’s most prominent Cold War intellectual and, as the Party’s “leading theoretician,” a noted enforcer of its orthodoxy. The author of a notorious tract justifying the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, Aptheker earned academic
Source: Lee Formwalt in the OAH Newsletter
11-1-06
Twenty-six years ago, at the behest of OAH President Gerda Lerner, the organization began a new and exciting Distinguished Lectureship program. Today it stands as one of the organization’s most engaging accomplishments, as it brings leading scholars to audiences across the country, both to impart a greater understanding of the American past and to raise money for the OAH. Gerda Lerner is widely recognized as a major force in the creation of Women’s History. She was only the second female preside
Source: OAH President Richard White in the OAH Newsletter
11-1-06
I have begun to worry that public history and public intellectuals are in danger of becoming oxymorons. Public history, to be sure, is alive and well in the states and, paradoxically, in private museums such as the Autry in Los Angeles, but its heartland is always going to be in Washington, D.C., and there it is not doing as well as it might. I taught a class in Washington, D.C. last year that involved dealing with many museums and many public historians, some of them people I have known for yea
Source: Thomas W. Zeiler in the OAH Newsletter
11-1-06
[Thomas Zeiler, professor of history at the University of Colorado, is executive editor of Diplomatic History and is a member of the advisory board of H-Diplo, an H-Net discussion list dedicated to the study of diplomatic and international history at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo.]
H-Diplo’s example of technological democracy in action raises comparisons with a far more well-known tool of the twenty-first century, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that encourages anyone to insert, revise, a
Source: Jennifer Howard writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education
11-10-06
An oral historian sits down with a survivor of Hurricane Katrina to hear a first-person account of the storm. Is their encounter a conversation about a historical event, or is that historian performing research on a human subject?
The scholar will have one answer. It may not jibe with the verdict of his or her college's institutional review board, whose mandate is to make sure that research involving humans stays within ethical bounds, regardless of the topic. Over the past decade,
Source: US News & World Report
11-5-06
Lou Gehrig was the first, and gave his name to a disease. Michael J. Fox is the latest, and gave his endorsement to politicians pushing research into his Parkinson's. Sick celebrities have become more than fodder for supermarket tabloids. They have helped shape modern medicine and how we view our own health, argues Barron Lerner, a physician and historian at Columbia University, in his new book, When Illness Goes Public (Johns Hopkins University Press). "Celebrities influence fashion, and c
Source: NYT
11-1-06
Edward W. Said published his highly influential polemic “Orientalism” nearly 30 years ago, and Robert Irwin, a British specialist in the history and culture of the Middle East, has been fuming ever since. “Dangerous Knowledge” is his belated two-pronged response: a point-by-point rebuttal of Mr. Said, folded into a history of Western scholarship devoted to the Middle East.
Mr. Irwin delays his direct attack until the penultimate chapter but throws down the gauntlet early. “Orientali
Source: Jerusalem Post
11-8-06
[The writer teaches political science at Ben-Gurion University. ]
Alan Dershowitz, Harvard's Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, has decided to attack me personally, thinking that if he undermines my reputation he can save his own. Paradoxically, he manages to prove one thing in his op-ed - that he is a consistent man.
As in his book The Case for Israel, here too, he relentlessly passes fiction for fact.
Despite Dershowitz's claims, I never compared Israe
Source: Jerusalem Post
11-8-06
It's ironic that those who shout loudest about freedom of speech for themselves and their friends are often the first to try to silence those with whom they disagree.
A case in point is Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University, who has defamed so many people, as well as the nation of Israel. He also recently defamed me by saying that I had tried to prevent the publication of Norman Finkelstein's latest anti-Zionist screed, Beyond Chutzpah. In fact, as I specifically wrote in my lett
Source: Announcement--George Mason University
11-8-06
Larry Levine's death is keenly felt by so many. A group of GMU colleagues have scheduled an East Coast memorial service for Larry, to take place from 4:30-6:30, Saturday, December 16th, in the Atrium of Hazel Hall at the Arlington campus of George Mason University,
3301 Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA. A reception will follow. The service is open to all; Cornelia Levine and possibly other members of the Levine family will attend.
We have set up a website with more informatio
Source: Journal of Multimedia Historys About "White Boy: A Memoir" Black Studies and Research in African American History
11-3-06
Historian Mark Naison is Professor of
African and African-American Studies and Director of the Urban
Studies Program at Fordham University. He is the author of White
Boy: A Memoir (Temple University Press, 2002), Communists in Harlem
During the Depression (University of Illinois Press, 1983),
co-author of The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1940-1984
(Rutgers University Press, 1986), and the author of several
articles on African-Americ
Source: Economist
11-4-06
EVER since "Salisbury: Victorian Titan" won its then 36-year-old author the Wolfson history prize in 1999, Andrew Roberts has been seen as one of the most eminent young British historians. So it is no surprise that, in his tenth book, he turns to Winston Churchill for inspiration. Mr Roberts limits his range to countries where English is the first language: America, Britain and its former dominions, core countries which he sees as "the last, best hope of Mankind", the source
Source: brynmawr.edu/news
11-2-06
Most writers who treat environmental issues, says environmental historian Ellen Stroud, tend to focus on either cities or wilderness, but not both. “And many environmentalists who focus on natural areas,” she says, “sort of wish cities away. But we need to be thinking about how cities can function well in relation to nature.”
Stroud's position — Assistant Professor of Growth and Structure of Cities and Environmental Studies on the Alderfer Fund — is a new one at the college. Stroud
Source: Wayne State student newspaper
11-6-06
Howard Zinn told an audience that the state of our nation lies somewhere between democracy and totalitarianism.
Beginning with the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, Zinn has been a tireless activist as well as a voice of dissent for over 40 years. Last night at Cobo Hall, the Cranbrook Peace Foundation honored the historian, author and lifelong peace activist.
Zinn, the author of the classic best-selling book “A People’s History of the United
