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: Mark Yost in the Philadelphia Inquirer
7-2-06
Even the most vehement critics of the war on terror will admit that our soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are some of the best that have ever stepped onto a battlefield. University of Dayton history professor Larry Schweikart argues that America's troops have always overcome adversity, poor equipment and yes, unpopularity to win wars and do so with aplomb.
How and why are detailed well in his new book, America's Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terro
Source: Scott McLemee at HNN blog Cliopatria
6-29-06
In the months after 9/11, you started hearing more and more references to Robert Kaplan as the closest thing to a geopolitical thinker to come from the ranks of roving journalistic correspondents -- apart from Tom Friedman, of course. They became the Mutt and Jeff of American punditry.
Friedman emphasizes trade and diplomacy; exhibits a rather straightforward appreciation of technology as a driving factor in human progress; is, in his most optimistic moments, prone to evoking a global futur
Source: Henry Holt & Company Press Kit
6-26-06
Your book is about the fourteen times the United States has overthrown a foreign government. Why do we do this so often?
Americans consider their country to be a force for good in the world. We believe we have found the way to success as a nation, and w
Source: Jon Wiener in Inside Higher Ed
6-30-06
Ward Churchill should be fired for academic misconduct — that’s the decision made by the interim chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, after receiving a report from a faculty committee concluding that Churchill is guilty of falsification, fabrication and plagiarism. That report shows that, even under difficult political conditions, it’s possible to do a good job dealing with charges of research misconduct. The Colorado report on Churchill provides a striking contrast to the flawed
Source: Jon T. Coleman in the Chronicle of Higher Education
6-28-06
[Jon T. Coleman is an assistant professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.]
I just finished the second year of my inaugural tenure-track job, and my contentment checklist borders on the obscene.
My kids, growing up fast, have become fixated on potty humor. They're happy. My wife is on sabbatical next year. She does not have to drive 300 miles and spend two nights away from us each week to teach. She's happy. My dog is snoring on the couch. He's happy. My firs
Source: Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed
6-28-06
This year marks the centennial of Upton Sinclair’s classic muckraking novel, The Jungle, or rather, of its appearance in book form, since it first ran as a serial in 1905. In April of last year, I interviewed Christopher Phelps, the editor of a new edition of the novel, for this column.
Most of Sinclair’s other writings have fallen by the wayside. Yet he is making a sort of comeback. Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of Boogie Nights and Magnolia, is adapting Sinclair’s novel Oil!
Source: Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed
6-28-06
The summer issue of the Journal of American History includes a thorough and judicious paper on Wikipedia by Roy Rosenzweig, a professor of history and new media at George Mason University. Should professional historians join amateurs in contributing to Wikipedia? “My own tentative answer,” he writes, “is yes.”
Rosenzweig qualifies that judgment with all the necessary caveats. But overall, he finds that the benefits outweigh the irritations. “If Wikipedia is becoming the family encyc
Source: Carlin Romano in the Chronicle of Higher Education
6-27-06
... Eventually, most wised-up readers of history come to agree with the advice of E.H. Carr, cited and honored by David S. Brown, that "Before you study the history, study the historian." The payoff of Brown's effort comes in Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography (University of Chicago, 2006), an incisive interpretive profile.
In choosing Hofstadter (1916-70) to explore Carr's rubric, Brown, associate professor of history at Elizabethtown College, fixes on a man wh
Source: NYT
6-26-06
Mary Martin McLaughlin, an internationally renowned scholar of the Middle Ages who spent the last four decades working almost entirely outside the academy, died on June 8 at her home in Millbrook, N.Y. She was 87.
The cause was cancer, her niece Kathleen Bayard Derringer said.
Ms. McLaughlin's small but distinguished body of work was highly regarded by academic medievalists around the world. Her research focused in particular on the role of women, children and families
Source: Inside Higher Ed
6-26-06
A federal judge on Friday gave the U.S. government 90 days to act on the visa application of a renowned Muslim scholar who has been kept out of the United States for two years, much to the distress of academic groups trying to bring him here.
The order by Judge Paul A. Crotty did not address all of the issues raised in a lawsuit by those groups challenging the way the government is deciding who may and may not enter the county. But in forcing the government to make a decision about
Source: WaPo
6-26-06
Simon Schama has a story to tell -- and as with all of this historian's stories, there's big-time drama involved. Schama's own story, you might say, is also about learning to write.He's made a life's work of mixing scholarship with dramatic narrative in ways that few of his scholarly peers can match.
Call it "How to Succeed by Doing What Other Historians Don't."
Does your typical academic write best-selling 900-page histories of the French
Source: Philip Weiss in the Nation
7-3-06
Mr. Weiss is the author of American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps (Harper Perennial).
Neoconservatism is an elite calling. It thrives in think tanks, not union halls; its proponents want most of all to influence the powerful. No wonder Ivy League labels have always been important to neocons. This fixation on intellectual prestige explains the recent neocon uprising over the possibility that Juan Cole, scholar and blogger, would become a Yale professor. It was one thing for Col
Source: NYT
6-21-06
Ending seven months of speculation, the Museum of Modern Art is to announce its new chief curator of architecture and design today: he is Barry Bergdoll, chairman of Columbia University's art history department, who will begin work in January.
Mr. Bergdoll, a prominent scholar of 19th- and 20th-century architecture, follows Terence Riley, who last November signaled his intention to resign after 14 years in the post. The job has been vacant since March 30, when Mr. Riley left to beco
Source: TomDispatch.com
6-20-06
Nick Turse stands at the door, a frizz of curly black hair, a fringe of beard, in a dark T-shirt and green cargo pants. Slung over his shoulder is a green backpack (a water bottle sticking out of a side pouch) so stuffed that he might well have been on a week's maneuvers. When I mention its size, he says, "Genuine military surplus," smiles, and lets it drop to the floor with a thunk. Immediately, he begins rummaging inside it and soon pulls out a tiny box sporting drawings of futuristi
Source: Inside Higher Ed
6-21-06
John Milios, associate professor of political economy and the history of economic thought at the National Technical University of Athens, was expecting to explain some of his ideas about class and politics when he flew to the “How Class Works” conference at the State University of New York at Stony Brook this month.
He just wasn’t expecting to do it in detainment at the airport.
According to e-mails Milios sent to colleagues, he was held and questioned for hours upon hi
Source: Press Release -- Allan Lichtman for U.S. Senate
6-19-06
Dear Supporters,
It seems that every day on the calendar marks another day of senseless violence in Iraq. On June 15th, the public learned that the death toll of American soldiers has reached 2,500. This truly sad and tragic milestone reminds us that years after the administration declared “Mission Accomplished” we have yet to keep our troops safe and bring them home.
The ongoing death and violence in Iraq is a tragic failure of American policy. America is truly at a
Source: Observer
6-18-06
On the eve of his new television series, the formidable academic and historians' historian argues passionately that the decline and fall of empires was the true cause of the bloody mess that was the 20th century.
***
You should have been born to serve the British Empire. But you are trapped inside the body of a man born in the 1960s, so what do you do? You become an ardent Thatcherite - aggressive on the battlefield and the economy. You write 'why oh why?' polemics for
Source: Joseph Frank in the course of reviewing Pipes's Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture and Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger; in the New Republic
6-14-06
Richard Pipes has had an extremely distinguished career both as a historian specializing in Russian history and culture and as a member of the Reagan administration. These books deal with both these aspects of his life, and one helps to illuminate the other. His views on Russian history, particularly as they related to the Soviet Union, attracted the attention of politicians such as Senator Henry Jackson, and he was invited to testify before Senate commissions and finally to accept a temporary p
Source: Herald (Glasgow)
6-19-06
JOHN Lorne Campbell, the Gaelic folklorist, historian and author, will be buried later this week on Canna, the island that was his home for six decades.
He died in Italy 10 years ago, but his remains have been exhumed from near Florence and will be taken back to Scotland on Wednesday, to lie in a grave set amidst trees he planted himself.
The decision to bring Dr Campbell's body back to the island was taken only after much soul-searching by his friend and executor Hugh
Source: Australian
6-20-06
Quadrant. n. 1. an instrument for taking angular measurements of altitudes in astronomy and navigation. 2. a magazine that takes right-angular measurements of attitudes at the ABC.
THE ranters at Quadrant, hereafter known as Quadranters, must be dancing a quadrille as they quadruple their influence in Australia's most important cultural institutions. For they're not just moving and shaking at the ABC. Though eclipsed by the announcement of Keith Windschuttle joining the public broad
