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: David Thompson at Butterfliesandwheels.com (blog)
7-11-06
Karen Armstrong has been described as “one of the world's most provocative and inclusive thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world”. Armstrong’s efforts to be “inclusive” are certainly “provocative”, though generally for reasons that are less than edifying. In 1999, the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Los Angeles gave Armstrong an award for media “fairness”. What follows might cast light on how warranted that recognition is, an
Source: Star Phoenix
8-16-06
CALGARY -- A desperate struggle for survival -- not the white man and his horse -- likely forced Plains Indians to band together in complex communities, at least 1,700 years before what is currently accepted.
And, the way they came together to ward off threats from southern bands from what are now the Dakotas and Minnesota may have resembled a very early form of North American diplomacy.
University of Calgary archeologist Dale Walde has proposed the controversial theory
Source: Michael Grunwald in the New Republic
8-14-06
... Katrina was not the Big One. To their credit, almost all the post-Katrina authors seem to recognize this, even if they do not dwell on it. Jed Horne, an editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, came up with the perfect title for his lucid and wrenching chronicle of the storm: Breach of Faith. Ivor van Heerden makes the same point in oversized type on the back cover of his memoir The Storm: "Properly designed and constructed levees would have protected the city. Instead, they collapsed.
Source: Melanie Eversley in USA Today
8-15-06
he old spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot could soon be recognized for its role in black American history.
A historian recently learned that he is descended from the slave couple believed to have written the song, and now he wants to publicize the story of his ancestors.
Currie Ballard says he was browsing through a bookstore around Christmas when he found Via Oklahoma: And Still the Music Flows by the late Mabel Alexander. Inside, he was startled to find a story identical to
Source: Richard Allsop in The Australian
8-15-06
[Richard Allsop is a research fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne.]
... Among all the positives the summit will produce, however, there is still some cause for concern. Speaking on ABC radio recently, Education Minister Julie Bishop said: ''Australian history should be a critical part of the school curriculum, it should at least be a stand-alone subject, and compulsory to say Year 10. I think we should have a great deal of pride in our nation's history, and to ens
Source: Email message from Nancy Toff, editorial director, Oxford University Press
8-14-06
I am very sad to report the death of one of our most esteemed
authors, Kermit Hall, in a swimming accident yesterday afternoon.
Kermit was the editor of The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court,
The Oxford Companion to American Law, and The Judicial Branch in the
Institutions of American Democracy series, and author of The Magic
Mirror: Law in American History, among many other books. At his
death he was working with us on the final stages of The Pursuit of
Justice: Supreme Court
Source: Albany Times Union
8-14-06
ALBANY -- Kermit L. Hall, the University at Albany's genial and scholarly 17th president, died in a swimming accident Sunday while on vacation in Hilton Head, S.C. He was 61.
The Associated Press reported that beachgoers rescued Hall and his wife, Phyllis, around 2:20 p.m. Sunday about 100 yards from shore. Hall died at Hilton Head Regional Medical Center around 3 p.m.
Friends said late Sunday night that Phyllis Hall was uninjured but they were unsure of details.
Source: Sam Tanenhaus in the NYT Book Review
8-6-06
At his death in 1970, Richard Hofstadter was probably this country’s most renowned historian, best known as the originator of the “consensus” school, whose measured siftings of the American past de-emphasized conflict — whether economic, regional or ideological — and highlighted instead the nation’s long tradition of shared ideas, principles and values.
This school had a limited shelf life, but Hofstadter’s work has outlived it, owing to the clarity and nuance of his thought and his
Source: NYT
8-11-06
James Harvey Young, a social historian of American medicine who wrote engaging studies of fraud, dubious cures and health quackery and later chronicled the birth of federal food regulation, died July 29 in Atlanta. He was 90.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his family said.
Dr. Young, an emeritus professor of history at Emory University, wrote two volumes on the study of drugs and therapeutic devices of the sort once hawked at sideshows and through mail-order c
Source: Press Release -- Washington College
8-4-06
Chestertown, MD, August 4, 2006 — On September 14 and 15, 2006, Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience will host a celebration to honor Stacy Schiff, 2006 winner of the George Washington Book Prize—one of the nation's largest literary awards. This year's event not only honors Ms. Schiff's book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, but also marks the 300th anniversary year of Benjamin Franklin's birth.
The centerp
12-31-69
SOURCE: Sur (English newspaper of southern Spain)
Fernando Arcas, Professor of History at Malaga University, agrees that one of his great passions in life is to listen to people talk about the past. And more so when the speakers have lived history in the flesh, as many old people in the province of Malaga have done. He is delighted with his latest project, which is to recuperate the “historical memory”, as the Spaniards call it, in reference to finally closing the worst chapter in modern
Source: OAH President Richard White in the OAH Newsletter
8-8-06
While preparing the OAH Strategic Plan in 2002, the OAH Executive Board recommended that future program committees “create sessions on scholarly controversies in which two or more distinguished historians take opposing positions.” It seemed a good idea at the time, and still seemed good when the committee met to plan the 2007 convention. This coming year is the one hundredth anniversary of the OAH, and if there were ever a time to show the diversity of views within the profession—and historians’
Source: Africa Today
7-31-06
The United Kingdom's defence ministry has categorically refused to release papers, which historians say may sort out the 53-year-old whodunit of a massacre involving UK troops at the height of the war against Mau Mau liberation fighters in Kenya. In an all out offensive to trounce the Mau Mau liberation fighters who the British then labelled 'insurgents', the Somali members of a loyalist militia group recruited to fight an all-too-powerful resistance and audacious guerrilla army, slaughtered 20
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
8-7-06
If you were David S. Brown, these would be heady days, indeed. His credentials, after all, are modest ones: 1995 Ph.D., University of Toledo; 1992 M.A., University of Akron; 1990 B.A., Wright State University; and he teaches at a modest institution: Elizabethtown College. Apparently free of overwhelming pressures to publish, Brown was able to devote ten yea
Source: Manan Ahmed at HNN blog, Cliopatria
8-8-08
I am not one to have much restraint when it comes to Bernard Lewis. Even so, I am absolutely stunned by his Op-Ed in today's WSJ, August 22. The Iranians, claims Lewis, cannot be deterred by the usual mutually assured destruction mumbo-jumbo:
There is a radical difference between the Islamic Republic of Iran and other governments with nuclear weapons. This diffe
Source: Press Release -- Network of Concerned Historians
8-8-08
Dear Colleagues,
International PEN reports about the plight of a Tibetan history
teacher, Dolma Kyab (pen-name Lobsang Kelsang Gyatso) (1976-),
sentenced to ten years' imprisonment in March 2005. He wrote
manuscripts covering topics such as democracy, the sovereignty of
Tibet, Tibet under communism, colonialism, religion, and geography.
He is in bad health.
We hope that you can send the recommended urgent appeals immediately.
Please remember to write in your professional cap
Source: Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine
8-1-06
David Blackbourn has an affection for fens and marshes, lush, low-lying polders and high moors of heath and bog. When he leaves his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, to visit the coast, he and his wife walk the creeks and saltmarshes of Essex and Gloucester, north of Boston. The sights and smells of such places, she says, induce in him a kind of reverie. Blackbourn’s sense of personal connection to well-watered lowlands perhaps owes something to his early years, growing up in England, in Lincoln
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
8-7-06
[Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College. Most recently he edited, with Richard J. Ellis, Debating the Presidency: Conflicting Perspectives on the American Executive (CQ Press, 2006).]
... [Robert Caro's] The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, which together told the story of Johnson's life through his first election to the Senate, in 1948, sold extremely well, and each volume won a National Book Critics Circle Award. The response of academic historians,
Source: Lawrence Journal-World
8-7-06
Two-thirds of Kansas lies west of U.S. Highway 81, away from the state’s major population centers, distant from its biggest universities.
Western Kansas can be a harsh, often desolate place, where rain is scarce, livelihood uncertain and hard times common. But many believe it is where the true Kansas character was forged.
Its inhabitants — those who’ve lasted two, three and four generations — are a special breed.
“They’ve had to be psychologically strong an
Source: NYT
8-6-06
Arlene Raven, a pioneering historian and advocate of women’s art, died Tuesday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 62.
The cause was cancer, said the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which represents her companion, the artist Nancy Grossman.
In 1973 Ms. Raven was a founder, with the artist Judy Chicago and the graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, of the Feminist Studio Workshop. It was the educational component of the Woman’s Building, a pioneering center devoted to w
