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: NEH
9-15-06
National Endowment Chairman Bruce Cole talked recently with Bernard Lewis, the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University.
A scholar on the history of Islam, Lewis has written more than twenty books, among them What Went Wrong: The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror.
Bruce Cole: Members of one culture are sometimes reluctant to understand enough about another
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH) #45a (Annual Report 2006)
9-17-06
The Network of Concerned Historians (NCH) forwards to its
participants news about the domain where history and human rights
intersect, as reported by:**the American Association for the Advancement of Science [AAAS,
Washington];
**Amnesty International [AI, London];
**Article 19 [A19, London];
**Human Rights Watch [HRW, Washington/New York];
**Index on Censorship [IOC, London];
**the Network of Education and Academi
Source: Eric Alterman in the Nation
9-18-06
It's a truism that once an accusation is leveled, it's impossible to erase entirely from the public memory. This is doubly true when it comes to the deceased, and doubly dangerous in our political world, in which debate is driven by cable news networks that show little interest in quaint questions involving what's actually true. The only apparent standard is what's actionable--or what's going to piss off the network brass. Given the fact that most casual news consumers cannot be expected to sift
Source: Euston Manifesto
9-12-06
[Prominent historians have signed the Euston Manifesto, an endorsement of liberal values in foreign affairs. According to Wikipedia: "The Euston Manifesto (pron. "yoosten", IPA /?ju?st?n/) is a declaration of principles by a group on the democratic left in support of universal human rights and other fundamental principles. It began as a conversation between friends, a gathering of (mainly British) academics, journalists, and activists. At their first meeting in London, they deci
Source: Max Holland, writing in the American Spectator
9-15-06
... historians will one day ponder why Philip Zelikow was selected as the commission's executive director. A friend of Condoleezza Rice's since their days together on the National Security Council under George H.W. Bush, Zelikow was a key member of Rice's transition team in 2000 and 2001 and was instrumental in the pivotal decision to demote counter-terrorism "czar" Richard Clarke. After 9/11, Zelikow remained an outside adviser to Rice, helping to draft the administration's 2002 natio
12-31-69
The Baltimore Sun reported on September 13, 2006 that"American University history professor Allan J. Lichtman was arrested while protesting his exclusion from a debate at Maryland Public Television studios in Baltimore."
Lichtman was one of 18 candidates for the Democratic nomination for Senator in Maryland. According to
Source: New York Sun
9-14-06
The victor of the war on terror is far from clear, the historian Bernard Lewis told a Hudson Institute conference.
The British-born professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton said Monday that he was "more optimistic about the future of our struggle" in the early 1940s — when the French had capitulated to the Germans, when Stalin was Hitler's ally, and when America was still neutral — than he is today."Hitler would have won under th
Source: NYT
9-14-06
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, an eminent French historian of the ancient world who became widely known for exposing wartime atrocities of the modern one, died on July 29 in Nice. He was 76.
The cause was a cerebral hemorrhage, his publisher, Éditions la Découverte, told the French newspaper Le Monde on July 30. Mr. Vidal-Naquet’s death has not been widely reported outside of Europe.
A leading scholar of Greek antiquity, Mr. Vidal-Naquet became known to a broad general readership
Source: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
9-13-06
NEW YORK, NY (SEPTEMBER 13, 2006) – Rebecca J. Scott, Charles Gibson Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Law at the University of Michigan has been selected as the winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded for the best book on slavery or abolition. Scott won for her book, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Harvard University Press). The book examines the path to freedom taken by two slave societies and their construction of post-emancipati
Source: Deutsche Welle
9-12-06
German historian and publisher Joachim Fest has died. The Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, which he co-published for two decades ending in 1993, said he died at his home near Frankfurt at the age of 79. Fest was seen as one of Germany's leading authorities on Nazism. He may be best remembered for his 1973 biography of Adolf Hitler, which was a best-seller.HNN Editor This is from the
Source: Editor & Publisher
9-11-06
NEW YORK Eric Alterman, perhaps the first writer to get a blog on a mainstream national news site, has been dismissed after 10 years by MSNBC.com.
"P.S., I’m Fired," he heads an email to others in the media.
His blog, Altercation, however, will be picked up by the liberal site Media Matters. He will also become a senior fellow there. Alterman has also been a longtime columnist at The Nation magazine. He teaches at City University of New York.
&quo
Source: Martin Marty in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
9-11-06
"Dumb me!" one says or thinks -- at least this one does -- when awakened to knowledge of what one's sleepy eyes and consciousness had long overlooked. For a half-century, I, like the colleagues of my generation among American religious historians, could babble for thousands of hours and write thousands of pages and yet show little awareness and make slight mention of Muslim-Protestant relations in this nation. Change for me began in 1988, when we started the "Fundamentalism Proj
Source: Howard Zinn interviewed by Dennis Prager at frontpagemag.com
9-12-06
[Dennis Prager hosts a nationally syndicated radio talk show based in Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, most recently "Happiness is a Serious Problem" (HarperCollins). His website is www.dennisprager.com. To find out more about Dennis Prager, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.]
Every so often, one hears the argument that "Left and Right" are outdated
Source: Ella Powers at Inside Higher Ed
9-12-06
She was popular in the classroom. She had taken students on a service learning trip to Guatemala over last winter break, and had brought some to the University of Oxford to meet with professors. She was working on an oral history project with World War II veterans. But there was a problem with her credentials.
Jaclyn LaPlaca taught history at Marywood University, in Pennsylvania, for the last academic year, and Rod Carveth — a colleague who began last fall at the same time as LaPlac
Source: Sage Ross at Wikipedia
8-31-06
Roy Rosenzweig's recent article in the Journal of American History, Can History be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past, seems to be having a powerful effect in turning the tide of academic opinion. Several posters suggested the article to naysayers. Said one, "Rosenzweig convinced me of the importance of this entity, which I had been trying unsuccessfully to ignore."
Source: Howard LaFranchi in the Christian Science Monitor
9-6-06
As the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, President Bush is reemphasizing his focus on the war on terror as the defining struggle of the age. With historical analogies his constant tool, the president compares Osama bin Laden to the ideological foes the United States faced in the 20th century - Lenin and Hitler, for example - and likens the struggle against Islamic radicalism to the cold war.
Such comparisons can help Americans understand the foe the US is up against, a
Source: Stephen Balch in the National Review Online
9-7-06
In recent years, Hamilton College has done little that would have pleased its namesake. It's hard to imagine that any of the founding generation's leaders—perhaps excepting Paine—
could find much to their liking in the college's fawning treatment of radical icons or its fervent multiculturalism. It was Hamilton that sought to bring former weather underground member and convicted terrorist, Susan Rosenberg, to campus as an instructor and "artist-in-residence", as it was Hamilton
Source: Patrick Garrity in the WSJ
9-6-06
[Patrick Garrity is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. This article first appeared in the Claremont Review of Books.]
In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, a Yale University student asked one of her instructors, "Would it be OK now for us to be patriotic?" The professor, John Lewis Gaddis, widely regarded as the dean of American Cold War historians, replied: "Yes, I think it would."
Even allowing for the emotions of the moment, s
Source: Ralph Luker (blog)
8-23-06
An internal investigating committee at the University of Cincinnati has found Don Heinrich Tolzmann guilty of plagiarism in his book, The German-American Experience. After reviewing charges first made three years ago on H-Ethnic, the committee has recommended that Tolzmann be dismissed as a faculty member in the Un
Source: Press Release
9-8-06
CHICAGO, IL -- SEPTEMBER 8, 2006 – A group of leading American historians today
sent the following letter to Mr. Robert Iger of ABC. Signatories include
Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Schlesinger and Sean Wilentz, Princeton University,
this year's winner of the Bancroft Prize, the American history profession's
highest honor. Stressing the significance of the “traumatic” events of 9/11, the
signers of this letter are calling on Mr., Iger to stand up for responsible
medi
