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: Times Online (UK)
8-3-06
THE LIFE of Robert Wokler embodied the political and intellectual tragedies and controversies of the later 20th century. A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Europe, he was close to the leading intellectual historians of the prewar generation and lived to contest with postmodernism the identity of the Enlightenment and its supposed responsibility for the tragedy of the Holocaust into which he was born.
Born Robert Lucien Wochiler in 1942 in Auch, France, to Polish and Hungarian Jewish refu
Source: Weekly Standard
8-7-06
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
What is a quintessential third-generation New York Jewish intellectual--me--doing moving to a house located between Shepherdstown and Martinsburg, West Virginia?
When I left 93rd Street and Broadway in 1992 for the Maryland suburbs of Washington, my New York friends thought my wife and I were mad. One does not simply discard one's roots and leave the Big Apple; it is just not done! Now, my Washington friends are shocked ("You're going where?&
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
8-3-06
When he was 12, historian James Harvey Young watched a medicine show performer peddle a worthless concoction meant to relieve gullible audience members of their hard-earned cash, if not their aches and pains.
"He noticed a lot of unsophisticated people paying their dollar for a bottle, and that lodged in him," said his son Harvey Galen Young of Atlanta.
He wanted to debunk the nostrum purveyors and bring rationalism to health care decisions and give people the
Source: The History Librarian (blog)
8-1-06
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, French historian and activist, died this past weekend; he was 76. So far, there are obituaries in Le Monde and Libération (there’s also a second, longer piece in Libération), but I have not seen any English-language obituaries as y
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
8-2-06
Lynn Downey lives for yesterday.
As the historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, she has spent 17 years retracing the company's past, which dates to 1853, when Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss opened a wholesale dry-goods business, selling merchandise to general stores throughout the West.
It has been Downey's job to chronicle how the company got from there to here over 153 years. At Levi's, she oversees a vast collection of records, in the form of clothing
Source: David White at Campus-Watch.org
8-3-06
[David White, a graduate of Yale University, is a writer in Washington. This article was written for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
Early last month, when it emerged that Yale University had decided to reject the appointment of University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, he blamed a" concerted press campaign by neoconservatives...[which] was inappro
Source: NY Times
8-2-06
Anthony Cave Brown, a British journalist who wrote books about espionage, including a study of the role of intelligence in the invasion of Europe in World War II, died on July 14 in Warrenton, Va. He was 77.The cause was complications of pneumonia, Edward Russell, his former brother-in-law, said.
Mr. Cave Brown’s best-known book, “Bodyguard of Lies” (1975), told how Churchill directly ordered elaborate schemes of deception to confuse the Germans about Allied pla
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
8-2-06
Lynn Downey lives for yesterday.
As the historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, she has spent 17 years retracing the company's past, which dates to 1853, when Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss opened a wholesale dry-goods business, selling merchandise to general stores throughout the West. It has been Downey's job to chronicle how the company got from there to here over 153 years. At Levi's, she oversees a vast collection of records, in the form of
Source: Mike Leonard in the Herald Times (Indiana)
7-11-06
With the announcement that Honda would build a major automobile
manufacturing plant near Greensburg, national attention was focused on the
southern Indiana town.
Nearly all of it was positive. A reporter for"All Things Considered" on
National Public Radio even said Greensburg" could be a movie set for an
ideal American small town." Honda labeled the Decatur County seat an"outstanding community of people."
Sociologist James W. Loewen would edit that statement slightly. Writing on
Source: Rachel Brune, writing in BlackAnthem.com
8-1-06
Blackanthem Military News, AL HADR, Iraq – Even as he is mired in the present concerns of coordinating logistics for Q-West Base Complex, Capt. Jesse Ballenger, 153rd Field Artillery Brigade, has one eye on the future.
Ballenger keeps another eye on the past, a consequence of his ongoing studies in archaeology as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona.
With his current project at the Hatra ruins, the Army National Guardsman and Norman, Okla., native is bringing
Source: Stephen Hahn in the New Republic in the course of a review of Foner's Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (Knopf)
7-28-06
... [Eric] Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he has been for most of his adult life. Like his mentor Richard Hofstadter, he has had an enormous influence on how other historians, as well as a good cut of the general reading public, have come to think about American history. This is the result of his voluminous scholarship and of his decades as a teacher. Indeed, when one considers the chronological and topical range of Foner's many books and essays--n
Source: Email from Bruce Craig to NCH board members
8-1-06
Dear NCH Policy Board, All Member Organizations, and Friends of the NCH:
During the meeting of the National Coalition for History (NCH) Policy
Board this morning, I announced that effective 1 January 2007, I will be
resigning as Executive Director of the history coalition as my wife
Patricia and I will be permanently moving to Prince Edward Island, Canada.
As many of you know, we have a summer home near East Point, PEI
(actually, Northlake Harbor --"the tuna capitol of the wo
Source: Baltimore Sun
7-30-06
Among his colleagues at the Naval Academy, there is a running joke circulating about Craig Symonds.
When Harrison Ford came to Annapolis in 1991 to shoot a few scenes for Patriot Games, he shadowed Symonds for a couple of days to sample the life of a civilian history professor at the military college. And when the movie was shot, they used his classroom.
That brought some ribbing from fellow professors, who joked that Symonds - like Jack Ryan, the CIA agent turned ac
Source: John Sutherland in the Guardian
7-25-06
When Tony Blair came to office in 1997 he relied for intellectual muscle on sociologists such as Tony Giddens - the LSE don who strategised the "third way". Nearly a decade later, as his "legacy" looms, it is the historians who are summing up the Blair years, bringing in their verdicts. Among them is David Runciman, who formulates his critique of Blair, post-9/11, as "the politics of good intentions". What, I ask him, does the phrase mean?
"It's no
Source: Wa Po
7-31-06
On a recent Monday in Hyattsville, as bleary-eyed drivers made their morning commute, Allan Lichtman was already breaking into a sweat trying to get their attention.
In pinstriped pants, a white-and-blue striped shirt and red tie, he stood on a small sliver of concrete median at a hot and humid intersection. With every passing car, he waved his hands and peered into the windows with a smile, as if to say: C'mon, give me something -- a wave, a honk, anything.
This is wha
Source: NYT
7-29-06
Keith R. DeVries, an archaeologist and authority on the excavation of Gordion, the ancient Turkish city once ruled by King Midas of the golden touch, died on July 16 in Philadelphia. He was 69.
The cause was cancer, his family said.
From 1977 to 1987, Dr. DeVries directed the University of Pennsylvania’s dig at Gordion, where members of the staff of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the university have been at work since the 1950’s. Gordion is about 55 miles
Source: NYT
7-29-06
Louise Simone Bennett-Coverly, a Jamaican poet and folklorist who became the voice of the island’s culture at home and abroad, died on Wednesday in Toronto. She was 86.
Her death was announced by the Jamaica Information Service, which did not give a cause. She was hospitalized in Toronto after collapsing late Tuesday night.
A social commentator who liberally used Jamaican patois and made famous the Jamaican catchphrase “Walk good,” she brought an overwhelming talent to
Source: Email from Rachelle Lacroix of the National Book Festival
7-28-06
My name is Rachelle Lacroix and I am contacting History News Network on behalf of the National Book Festival. I wanted to get in touch with you because I thought the HNN audience would be interested in learning about an opportunity to meet and interact with many of the nation's most beloved writers, artists and storytellers at the National Book Festival this September in Washington, DC. I've pasted the full, official press release at the bottom of this email for your review which includes a lis
Source: Email sent to HAW members
7-27-06
The Steering Committee of Historians Against the War deplores the role of the U.S. government in widening the circle of violence in the Middle East. We condemn the Bush Administration’s senseless quest for military solutions to the region’s problems exemplified by the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic and material aid for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and threats of military action against Iran. We call upon Congress and the Bush Administration to support an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon/Israel
Source: Mark Mayerson (blog)
7-21-06
[I've worked as an animator, writer, producer and director in TV animation for 29 years. I created the cgi series Monster By Mistake. Currently, I'm working towards a Masters degree at York University in Film Studies and teaching animation at Sheridan College.]
Paul Johnson is no lightweight. He's authored books such as The Birth of the Modern, Intellectuals, and A History of the English People. That's why it's so disappointing that his latest book, Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picass
