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
10-12-06
The National Book Award finalists, announced yesterday, include “American Born Chinese” by Gene Luen Yang in the young people’s literature category, the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award. The winners will be announced in a ceremony on Nov. 15. In fiction, the finalists are Mark Z. Danielewski for “Only Revolutions”; Ken Kalfus for “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country”; Richard Powers for “The Echo Maker”; Dana Spiotta for “Eat the Document”; and Jess Walter for “The Ze
Source: Todd Gitlin at the American Prospect blog
10-10-06
The NYU historian Tony Judt was invited to speak October 3 on the subject of “The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy” to a discussion group entitled Network 20/20, which always holds its meetings at Manhattan’s Polish Consulate. But Judt received a call from Patricia Harrington, the president of the group, canceling his talk. She told Judt (as he recounted in a widely distributed e-mail) that the Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League, who “warned them off hosting anythin
Source: NYT
10-11-06
Born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, Edward Said, the writer and literary critic who died of leukemia in 2003, was perhaps fated to feel forever the outsider. In “Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said,” the director Sato Makoto examines the roots of his subject’s chronic alienation and sympathy for the Palestinian cause, visiting his childhood homes in Jerusalem, Cairo and Beirut, and encouraging the recollections of a wide variety of friends and family members.
Source: Press Release -- Oxford University Press (Niko Pfund)
10-10-06
Oxford University Press is deeply saddened by the news that Sheldon Meyer, Oxford’s legendary editor, passed away on October 9 after a long illness. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. It goes without saying that Sheldon Meyer’s career inspires many of us here at Oxford; Sheldon was the Maxwell Perkins of American history publishing, an editor who published many of Oxford’s most distinguished titles over the last forty years and won many a Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize. He made equally i
Source: Phareswire.com
10-10-06
In an interview with Radio Free Iraq, Middle East expert and Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Dr Walid Phares appealed to Iraqi academics and intellectuals to address their colleagues in the United States and express their real aspirations on democracy and freedom. Phares, who taught political science and Midle East studies at several Florida Universities since 1992, and who also taught in Beirut in the 1980s said he is speaking in the name of many American acade
Source: Olivier Guitta in the Weekly Standard
10-16-06
[Olivier Guitta is a foreign affairs and counterterrorism consultant in Washington.]
ON SEPTEMBER 20, the State Department denied a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan on the grounds that he had contributed around 600 euros to a French charity classified as a terrorist organization since 2003 because of its relationship with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. This latest exclusion follows on the revocation of Ramadan's visa to live and work in the United States while teaching a
Source: Steven Erlanger in the NYT
10-7-06
... Rashid Khalidi, American-born, comes from one of Jerusalem’s most distinguished families, which has also provided another distinguished historian, Walid Khalidi. Together they have done much to provide a Palestinian narrative rooted in their personal histories but disciplined by the standards of Western scholarship.
Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, “The Iron Cage,” is at heart a historical essay, an effort to decide why the Palestinians, unlike so many other peoples and tribes, hav
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN's Cliopatria (blog)
10-10-06
I've long been proud of the fact that KC Johnson is one of the founding members of Cliopatria. He is featured in Kurt Anderson's"Rape, Justice, and the ‘Times'," New York Magazine, 16 October, an article that rips into the Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse case. My favorite paragraphs:
In the movie, Tom Hanks would play K. C. Johnson. He's the most impressive of the"bloggers who have closely
Source: NYT
10-9-06
... Mr. Hastert [who believes that George Soros and the Democrats are behind the Foley scandal] is a leading figure in a political movement that exemplifies what the historian Richard Hofstadter famously called “the paranoid style in American politics.”
Hofstadter’s essay introducing the term was inspired by his observations of the radical right-wingers who seized control of the Republican Party in 1964. Today, the movement that nominated Barry Goldwater controls both Congress and
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
10-9-06
Like many Americans of Iranian descent, Hamid Dabashi read an article in the April 17 issue of The New Yorker with anxious dismay.
In that article, Seymour Hersh reported that President Bush's administration was preparing an airstrike against Iran, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.
The president himself dismissed the report as "wild speculation." But Mr. Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia Univer
Source: Wa Po
10-9-06
Two major American Jewish organizations helped block a prominent New York University historian from speaking at the Polish consulate here last week, saying the academic was too critical of Israel and American Jewry.
The historian, Tony Judt, is Jewish and directs New York University's Remarque Institute, which promotes the study of Europe. Judt was scheduled to talk Oct. 4 to a nonprofit organization that rents space from the consulate. Judt's subject was the Israel lobby in the Uni
Source: Tom Reiss in the NYT Book Review
10-8-06
[Tom Reiss is the author of “The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.”]
In November 2005, Fritz Stern received an award for his life’s work on Germans, Jews and the roots of National Socialism, presented to him by Joschka Fischer, then the German foreign minister. With a frankness that startled some in the audience, Stern, an emeritus professor of European history at Columbia University, peppered his acceptance speech with the similarities he saw between
Source: Steven Plaut in The American Thinker
10-5-06
The new academic school year is well underway. But there is one school in which this year will determine once and for all whether it will henceforth be considered to be a bona fide “university”, or merely a make-pretend parody of one.
That institution is DePaul University.
This year will witness the most important decision in DePaul’s entire history, ever since it was first founded by the Catholic “Vincentians”. Over the next few months, DePaul will be deciding whet
Source: Clare Spark, in an email sent to H-HOAC: A Forum for scholars, serious students, and all who want to participate in a scholarly discussion of the History of American Communism (HOAC)
10-5-06
I have been thinking, with some agitation, about Bettina Aptheker's
astonishing revelation of incest, as reported by Chris Phelps' review
in the _Chronicle of Higher Education_ ever since it was posted
yesterday. I find it even more astonishing that the review accepts this
and her other claims against her father (low pay for black help,
criticism of Jewish passivity in the Holocaust) at face value.
Moreover, as some other commentators have
noted, it is passing strange that she wait
Source: Ig Noble website
10-5-06
The 2006 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded on Thursday night, October 5, at the 16th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard's Sanders Theatre.
[Ig Noble Prizes are a spoof of the Noble Prize. They are awarded annually to those with quirky achievements. In 2005 people doing history won several prizes: " James Watson of Massey University, New Zealand, for his scholarly study, 'The Significance of Mr. Richard Buckley’s Exploding Trousers.' " The American Nudis
Source: Email from David Beito to members of Richard Jensen's CNET list
10-4-06
At the upcoming Atlanta conference of the American Historical
Association, a group of historians will propose a strongly worded
resolution (shown below) opposing the use of speech codes to restrict
academic freedom. The vote will take place at the business meeting for
the general membership on Saturday, January 6, 2007 in the Fulton/Cobb
Room at the Atlanta Hilton.
To get the resolution on the agenda, however, twenty-five paid-up
members have to sign it before October 13.
Those A
Source: MESA
10-3-06
Dear Secretary Rice:
We, the Middle East Studies Association of North America’s Committee on Academic Freedom, are writing to express our grave concern and dismay over the Department of State’s denial of a visa for a second time to a world-renowned scholar of Islam, Professor Tareq Ramadan. It is apparent that this decision was made on purely political grounds, in clear violation of the principles of academic freedom and free speech, both of which are critical to the functioning of
Source: Christopher Phelps in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
10-3-06
[Christopher Phelps, an associate professor of history at the Ohio State University at Mansfield, is the author of Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist, published last year in a new paperback edition by the University of Michigan Press.]
... Now we have knowled
Source: Tariq Ramadan in an op ed in the Wa Po
10-1-06
For more than two years now, the U.S. government has barred me from entering the United States to pursue an academic career. The reasons have changed over time, and have evolved from defamatory to absurd, but the effect has remained the same: I've been kept out.
First, I was told that I could not enter the country because I had endorsed terrorism and violated the USA Patriot Act. It took a lawsuit for the government eventually to abandon this baseless accusation. Later, I reapplied
Source: Cambridge University Press email to HNN
10-2-06
The following are a series of questions and answers with Mark Moyar that will provide further understanding of his revolutionary argument in Triumph Forsaken:
Q: You argue in Triumph Forsaken that much of what is traditionally believed about the Vietnam War is not true. Let’s start with your views on South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem. The traditional thinking is that he was unpopular among the South Vietnamese people and that, after his crackdown on the Buddhist monks, the
