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: Jacob Laskin at frontpagemag.com
7-28-06
Question: What’s the difference between the Arab League and the academic Left that despises Israel? Answer: Only the Arab League is willing to condemn Hezbollah.
The surreal politics of this war finds Saudi Arabia attributing “full responsibility” to Hezbollah and calling on the terrorists to “alone shoulder the crisis they have created;” it finds Kuwaiti journalists lauding the “operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon [that] are in the interest of people of Arab countries and the
Source: Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed
7-27-06
Saoud El Mawla was a year late in accepting a position as professor at Earlham College. He was supposed to start in the 2003-4 academic year. But the tightening of visa rules post-9/11 meant that Lebanese citizens like El Mawla were unable to get the necessary documents to come to the United States. It didn’t matter that El Mawla has been hired to teach peace studies, and was an outspoken advocate for non-violent solutions to the problems of the Middle East. It took nearly a year of negotiations
Source: Scott McLemee at HNN blog, Cliopatria
7-23-06
There has been a controversy, of sorts, over whether or not the standard edition of Upton Sinclair's muckraking classic The Jungle is the product of changes imposed on the author by his publisher. That is the claim of See Sharp Press, which publishes what it dubs The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, based on the serialized version of the novel as it first ran in 1905. The book offered by See Sharp is somewhat longer than the text issued by a commercial press the next year.
Source: John Tierney in the NYT
7-25-06
To Hezbollah, there is no such thing as “collateral damage” from its missiles. Israel keeps telling the world that its army aims only at military targets, but Hezbollah doesn’t even pretend to. Its soldiers proudly fire away at civilians.
These terrorists consider themselves men of honor, and unfortunately they are — by their own definition. We in the West can call them barbaric, which they also are, but they’re following an ancient social code, even if we can’t recognize it anymore
Source: Kevin Matthews in the UCLA International Institute
7-21-06
As one of eight American universities offering a PhD in Women's Studies, and one of two in North America offering a PhD in Islamic Studies, UCLA is a logical place to seek fresh contributors for a journal focusing on women in a very broadly defined Middle East. Previously edited by University of Michigan Middle East studies director Marcia C. Inhorn, the two-year-old Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (JMEWS), published three times a year, is moving to a new editorial shop in the UCLA Center
Source: Michelle Grattan in the Australian Age
7-23-06
Does your child know when James Cook sailed up the Australian coast? That's what Education Minister Julie Bishop is asking kids she meets. Hardly any have the answer, which is confirming the Government's view that Australian history has gone missing in our schools.
Governments like to call "summits" on every damn thing. Still, the August 17 one-day Australian History Summit might at first blush seem an odd enterprise. Not, however, if you are John Howard and your agenda in
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
7-24-06
With the debut of his Web log, Informed Comment, four years ago, Juan R.I. Cole became arguably the most visible commentator writing on the Middle East today. A professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and president of the Middle East Studies Association, Cole has voiced strong opposition to the war in Iraq and to the treatment of the Palestinians, garnering him plaudits from the left and condemnation from supporters of Israel and Preside
Source: Donna L. Cole in The Capital
7-10-06
One was a 19th century slave, the other a 21st century college student.
An abolitionist and a scholar of history, whose destinies, though so very different from one another, brought them to the same place. And now the path of the student and that of the slave have met in New York City.
Tim Shenk, of Annapolis, went to New York by way of Columbia University. A 2003 graduate of the Severn School, Mr. Shenk is a history major entering his junior year at Columbia.
Fr
Source: LAT
7-23-06
By now, Waskar Ari should be preparing his lectures for the fall semester at the University of Nebraska, a year's professorship already under his belt. The Bolivian historian and political scientist, an Aymara Indian with a doctorate in history from Georgetown University, was offered a tenure-track post in Lincoln teaching Latin American history more than a year ago.
But Ari has yet to obtain a U.S. visa. He hears rumors that he has been accused of "terrorist" connections,
Source: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
7-21-06
NEW HAVEN, CT (JULY 21, 2006) – Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, has announced the finalists for the Eighth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.
The finalists are: Steven Deyle for “Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life” (Oxford University Press); Richard Follett
Source: NYT
7-22-06
The PBS documentarian Ken Burns has been working for six years on “The War,” a soldier’s-eye view of World War II, and those who have seen parts of the 14-plus hours say they are replete with salty language appropriate to discussions of the horrors of war.
What viewers will see and hear when the series is broadcast in September 2007 is an open question.
A new Public Broadcasting Service policy that went into effect immediately when it was issued on May 31 requires produ
12-31-69
Josh Marshall, who possesses a PhD in colonial American history from Brown University, has climbed from blogger to MSM columnist.
Marshall is the liberal behind TalkingPointsMemo.com, a widely read political blog. He also blogs at TPM Cafe.
Now he'll be writing a column for Time Magaz
Source: Kleeb Campaign Website
7-1-06
As a fourth generation Nebraskan, Scott Kleeb has deep roots in three great traditions of this state: agriculture, patriotism and public service.
Scott's great-grandfather, Albert Kleeb, was born in a dug-out outside of Broken Bow, Nebraska, before the turn of the century. He once hiked three days to earn 20 ewes and a dollar in exchange for his farm goods. This windfall was to be the origins of the Kleeb family farm and ranch, which stood outside of Broken Bow for nearly 100 years.
Source: Christopher Silvester: Review of LETTERS FROM OXFORD: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson; in Times Online (UK)
7-16-06
These letters were never intended for publication. Indeed, when asked late in the correspondence whether he would want them returned, Hugh Trevor-Roper even contemplated burning them. For apart from being wonderfully wise and witty, they are vicious about Oxford colleagues, and at least one of them contained such a heinous libel (of the royal physician attending George VI, see panel, below right) that it might have cost Trevor-Roper dear if it had fallen into the wrong hands. Although their cont
Source: Alice M. Sohn in a Letter to the Editor of the NYT
7-17-06
[The writer is a former executive editor in the textbook divisions of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Holt, Rinehart & Winston.]
To the Editor:
Re “Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality” (front page, July 13):
Similarities between two history texts are not, as Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for the textbook publisher Pearson Prentice Hall, maintains, “absolutely an aberration” — as a more extensive examination of texts in any field would verify.
Source: News Today
7-6-06
The 19th century was the century in which the craft of history became a thoroughly modern profession. It was the Age of great historians - of Ranke and Mommsen, Burckhardt and Fustel de Caulanges, Macaulay and Maitland, and of that great subverter of accepted pieties, Karl Marx. All these great historians and writers produced imperishable masterpieces, defining new fields and bringing new methods and new perspectives to familiar subject matter. Their books have become imperishable for two reason
Source: chronicle of Higher Ed
7-17-06
It was only a year ago that I told my story in these pages, describing how I had returned to graduate school at age 55 to finish my Ph.D. in history and how, as a result, I had earned the sobriquet from my students at Brown University as the Oldest Living TA.
After spending 30 years as a public historian for various historical agencies and ultimately for the U.S. Department of State, I decided to go back to Brown to finish what I had started so long ago. But when my essay was publis
Source: Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian
7-13-06
It's taken me nearly a week to read all 353 comments posted on the Guardian blog in response to my column last week about cheese-eating surrender monkeys and fire-eating war junkies. I'm still reeling. Take this post from KCharlesSimmonds: "The west is at war. The enemy has two faces, personified by Mohammad Atta and Timothy Garton Ash. TGA strums away on his keyboard, congratulating himself and us on our complacency and irresolution. Go on, roll over, fall asleep, lie back and take it.&quo
Source: Editors of the NYT Bk Rev: "Up Front"
7-16-06
Henry Ward Beecher, the subject of a new biography reviewed on this week's cover by Michael Kazin, had a lot in common with William Jennings Bryan, the subject of Kazin's own recent biography, "A Godly Hero." In an e-mail message Kazin points out that both were skilled orators deeply concerned with religious and political issues. As a college student, Bryan once attended a lecture by the aging Beecher, Kazin writes, and his own sentimental theology was influenced by Beecher's "gos
Source: Press Release -- Harvard W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
7-14-06
Cambridge, MA. – Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) on July 10 at the society's 116th annual convention, held in Addison, Texas.
Gates learned of the Revolutionary War veteran in his lineage while filming his PBS documentary, "African American Lives," a program
