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: Rutgers News
9-18-06
Cherry blossoms blooming in springtime. Stately houses of worship and historic structures rising above a city skyline. Baseball, art and foods from around the world. Sounds like Washington? Think again –this is Newark, a city that many people know of – but few people actually know.
A new film about Newark, to be broadcast in October, will change that. “The Once and Future Newark,” a documentary hosted by famed historian Clement A. Price, will premiere on NJN Public Television in New
Source: The Australian
10-2-06
SCOTLAND'S most pro-British historian has performed a remarkable about-face and declared his support for Scottish independence.
Michael Fry, a former Scottish candidate for the Conservative and Unionist Party, says the break-up of Britain is essential if Scotland is to thrive.
His conversion is a symptom of the growing support north of the border for a separate Scotland, with more people now saying they would back independence rather than the status quo in a referendum.
Source: Common-Place.org
10-1-06
Most reviews of my recent biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, mention that I am a practicing Mormon. The Sunday New York Times titled its review, "Latter-Day Saint: A practicing Mormon delivers a balanced biography of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith." Perhaps a little oversensitive, I wondered why this was news. Was a Mormon telling the story of the church’s founding prophet with a degree of objectivity something like man bites dog? Did the editor mean that a mind capable
Source: Znet
10-1-06
The ethnic cleansing of Palestine, Publication date: October 19th 2006 Hardcover, £16.99, 336pp, 1-85168-467-0
The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war.
-- David Ben-Gurion writing to his son, 1937
There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist.
-- Golda Meir, statement to The Sunday Times, 15 June, 196
Source: Episcopal Life
9-30-06
A number of people attending the 2006 General Convention brought to the attention of the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of the Episcopal Church a full-page advertisement for “The Leonidas Polk Bi-Centennial Memorial Series” placed by the Sewanee On-Line History Museum in Episcopal Life’s General Convention Guide.
We find the advertisement’s celebration of Leonidas Polk – a slaveholding bishop who died in battle fighting to preserve a racist social order – and its proud
Source: NYT
10-1-06
n June 2005, two senior national security officials in the Bush administration came together to propose a sweeping new approach to the growing problems the United States was facing with the detention, interrogation and prosecution of terrorism suspects.
In a nine-page memorandum, the two officials, Gordon R. England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, and Philip D. Zelikow, the counselor of the State Department, urged the administration to seek Congressional approval for its de
Source: Peter Steinfels in the NYT
9-30-06
n classical Judaism, resurrection of the dead was a central belief, essential to defining oneself as a Jew. “Today,” writes Jon D. Levenson, professor of Jewish studies at Harvard, that fact “comes as a shock to most Jews and Christians alike.”
Apart from the Orthodox minority, most Jews, including those who acknowledge belief in the resurrection as a part of Judaism’s historical legacy, seem to rush by the idea as quickly as possible, rendering it perhaps as a metaphor for how one’
Source: NYT Editorial
9-30-06
It has taken five and a half years, but at least some of President Bush’s aides have begun to acknowledge the patently obvious: There needs to be a serious effort to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Without one, the United States has no chance of salvaging its battered reputation in the Islamic world. No chance of rallying moderate Arab leaders to fight extremists or contain Iran. And no chance of ensuring Israel’s lasting security. We just hope that Mr. Bush will now make t
Source: HNN Staff
9-30-06
Bob Woodward's new book on the Bush Administration, State of Denial, cites several memos written by top aides that provided an account of events in Iraq that were starkly different from what the president was saying publicly, according to reports published in the NYT:
Some of those memorandums were written by Philip D. Zelikow, a counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, including one in early 2005 in which
Source: The Morning News
9-26-06
Of the numerous reasons that I found it compelling to speak with Princeton historian Sean Wilentz last winter, those that matter here are my fears of the state of historical pedagogy in the United States (Wilentz observes: “They’re not just interesting facts, they have within them historical importance, and what is historical importance? It’s what helps lead us from then to now.”) and the publication of what fellow historian Gordon Wood has termed a “monumental book,” The Rise of American Democr
Source: LAT
9-28-06
Frederic E. Wakeman Jr., a retired UC Berkeley expert on Chinese history who helped open China to Western scholars and wrote several books admired for their meticulous research and compelling style, died of cancer Sept. 14 at his home in Lake Oswego, Ore. He was 68.
Wakeman retired from UC Berkeley in June after spending his entire four-decade career there. He was the Walter and Elise Haas Professor of Asian Studies and a past director of the university's Institute of East Asian Stu
Source: Inside Higher Ed
9-25-06
A week ago, when the National Endowment for the Humanities was asked to respond to a letter from historians and archivists questioning some recent policy shifts by the agency, an NEH spokesman called the letter “thoughtful.”
On Friday, the NEH released a formal response to the letter, calling it anything but thoughtful. Rather, the letter was characterized as containing “inaccuracies and distortions” and the scholars involved were accused of spreading “false and misleading informati
Source: Inside Higher Ed
9-26-06
The U.S. State Department has again denied a visa to Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss scholar teaching at the University of Oxford, who has been invited to speak and teach in the United States. In June, a federal judge ordered the government to either grant a visa or provide an explanation of why it would not do so. The visa was denied on the basis of donations Ramadan made to charitable groups in France that the State Department says support terrorism through Hamas. Civil liberties and academic groups ar
Source: John J. Miller at National Review Online
10-9-06
A decade ago, best-selling author Stephen Ambrose donated $250,000 to the
University of Wisconsin, his alma mater, to endow a professorship in American
military history. A few months later, he gave another $250,000. Until his death
in 2002, he badgered friends and others to contribute additional funds. Today,
more than $1 million sits in a special university account for the
Ambrose-Heseltine Chair in American History, named after its main benefactor and the
long-dead professor who tr
Source: Harvey Blume in the Boston Globe
9-24-06
WHEN THE Glasgow-born Harvard historian Niall Ferguson and I got together in his office last week, he asked if he might prepare tea before we launched into a discussion of his new book, ``The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West."
Gracious as the offer was, in England, where Ferguson, 42, spends part of the year as an Oxford research fellow (he's also a columnist for the Daily Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times), he is known less for his dis
Source: UCLA International Institute
9-21-06
When Geoffrey Robinson last saw the archives that chronicle the creation of East Timor, they were stored in an unremarkable Dili warehouse: one large room of audio recordings, transcripts, and reports, protected by a key and padlock and a low-ranking archivist.
Set up in 2000, the Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation, better known by its Indonesian acronym CAVR, collected records on the period from 1974, when Portugal began to relinquish colonial control, through the 1
Source: Pittsburg Post-Gazette
9-24-06
History Channel viewers regularly tune in for information about a name from the past, a distant place or a forgotten age. Part history and part entertainment, it generally adds up to solid information.
It's not often that a university can boast that the on-camera expert is one of its own. That was the case recently when California University of Pennsylvania assistant professor Paul Crawford appeared on the "Lost Worlds" segment about the Knights Templar.
Dr.
Source: ABC News
9-22-06
President Kennedy scribbled "Vietnam" over and over, drawing a box around the word each time.
President Eisenhower sketched a picture of himself looking larger than life, bare-chested, and with a head full of hair.
President Reagan doodled smiling cowboys alongside love notes to his wife.
Presidents Carter and Ford left no scribblings.
It's not the first thing a scholar might search for in the public record, but presidential doodl
Source: OregonLive.com
9-24-06
Garrett Epps has nearly covered the waterfront as a writer: novelist, historian, op-ed commentator, humorist. (Word is that this University of Oregon Law School prof holds his students' attention in the lecture hall pretty well, too.) His latest book, "Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America," shows off his abilities as a strategic historian -- one who makes the chess moves of the past come alive and seem sharply relevant to t
Source: newstimeslive.com (CT)
9-22-06
DANBURY -- Western Connecticut State University Professor Todd Brewster calls the U.S. Supreme Court's 2005 eminent domain ruling the most controversial since the 1973 landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade.
The decision, stemming from a New London case, gave power to cities to tear down homes for shopping malls and hotel complexes for tax revenue.
On Wednesday at 7 p.m., the lawyers representing the parties in Kelo v. New London, the bitter case that pitted the city of New Lond
