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: National Review Online
6-14-06
This just in: We’re going to win the war on terror. Or so University of Dayton history professor Larry Schweikart says. He is author of the new book, America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror and thinks the case is made in American military and political history. Schweikart went through some of it in an interview with National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: So why does the U.S. win wars?
Larry Schweikart: The gli
Source: Christianity Today
6-12-06
Faithful readers may recall the parallel-universe cabinet proposed in our 2004 election issue (the one with "Bono for President" on the cover), which included Mark Noll as Secretary of History: "Imagine the president meeting every two weeks, say, with his historian. Everyone else around him is focused relentlessly on the present, not least on the ever-proliferating opinion polls. When his advisers venture into history, they generally do so in the spirit of a raid—to rip from its c
Source: Informed Comment (blog)
6-9-06
I am not going to talk about the Yale affair per se.
But I did want to clear up some misimpressions I've seen here and there.
First, it should be remembered that senior professors are sort of like baseball players, and other teams look at them from time to time, as recruitment prospects. It goes on constantly, formally or informally. Such looking is never taken very seriously by anyone unless it eventuates in an actual offer.
Second, it is important in in
Source: Australian Broadcasting Corp.
6-15-06
The Australian Federal Government is being accused of stacking the ABC board with more political allies. Federal Labor says the appointment of historian Keith Windschuttle is unacceptable because his disdain for the ABC is well known.ABC staff-elected director-elect, journalist Quentin Dempster, says Mr Windschuttle's appointment confirms the politicisation of the board and harms perceptions of the independence and integrity of the national broadcaster.
He says
Source: Michiko Kakutani in the course of a review in the NYT of Mr. Berman's Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire (Norton, 2006)
6-16-06
This is the sort of book that gives the Left a bad name.
In "Dark Ages America: The Final Phase of Empire," the cultural historian Morris Berman delivers a vituperative, Spenglerian screed that makes Michael Moore seem like a rah-rah American cheerleader: a screed that describes this country as "a cultural and emotional wasteland," suffering from "spiritual death" and intent on exporting its false values around the world at the point of a gun; a republi
Source: LAT
6-15-06
Most of us probably think of the acoustical tile as a humble artifact from Home Depot. But not so Emily Thompson.
To the UC San Diego history professor, it is an icon of modern civilization, belonging on a pedestal along with Cubist art, Einsteinian physics and James Joyce's "Ulysses."
Introduced just before World War I, the sound-absorbing tile represents humanity's new ability to manipulate the built environment and avoid the sonic assaults of other modern i
Source: William R. Hawkins at frontpagemag.com
6-15-06
... Today, the Left is looking for a new champion to “contain” the United States, and, if possible, impose such a major defeat on America that a crisis of legitimacy will pave the way for revolution. It was, after all, Russia’s debacle in World War I that brought down the Romanov dynasty. And aging New Leftists still revel in how much the anti-war movement during Vietnam changed America, even if the desire to “turn the guns around” and “bring the war home” did not pan out. The attempt to recreat
Source: Harvard Gazette
6-8-06
American democracy is not a static, unchanging phenomenon, but rather an ongoing argument said Sean Wilentz, this year's Phi Beta Kappa orator.
Because of its evolving nature, democracy is not something that can be easily exported, nor does it come about automatically as the result of overthrowing tyranny, he said.
"Our own history shows differently," said Wilentz, the Dayton-Stockon Professor of History at Princeton University and author of "The Rise o
Source: John H. Summers in NY Observer
6-19-06
John H. Summers teaches intellectual history at Harvard. His biography of C. Wright Mills will be published by Oxford University Press.
[Review of Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, by David S. Brown. University of Chicago Press, 291 pages, $27.50.]
Richard Hofstadter spent most his adult life in the “Upper West Side Kibbutz,” an area of Morningside Heights bounded by Claremont Avenue, Riverside Drive and Columbia’s Hamilton Hall. Of the eminences who inhabited th
Source: David Greenberg in Slate
6-7-06
[David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column and teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.]
"The paranoid style in American politics." … "Status anxiety." … "Anti-intellectualism in American life." … "Third parties are like bees: Once they have stung they die." —Richard Hofstadter.
Richard Hofstadter's name is cited a lot in our political culture—a lot, at least,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
6-13-06
ALL Souls College, Oxford, announced yesterday that it was not prepared to relocate a sundial designed by Sir Christopher Wren in order to receive a bequest from a former fellow who made it a condition of his will.
The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday that Dr John Simmons, an Oxford academic and All Souls historian who died last year aged 90, had left his old college an undisclosed sum from his pounds 880,000 estate, but only if the sundial was put back to its former position in
Source: dw-world
6-8-06
In an interview with DW-WORLD.DE, US historian Timothy Naftali says Germans should pressure their own government to receive more information on the role of Nazis in German government after 1945.
The US Central Intelligence Agency~recently declassified some 27,000 pages of its operational records from the post-World War II era. At the time, the US covered up the identities of ex-Nazis and used them as spies against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Timothy Naftali i
Source: Johann Hari in the Independent (UK)
6-12-06
Next week, Channel 4 will broadcast a startlingly obscene television series. A handsome historian will walk around the rubble and mass graves of Soviet Russia and declare with an aggressive smile, "If it hadn't been Stalin, it might have been somebody worse. In any case, Russia has been ruled by murderous despots for centuries and centuries, so you might as well cast a moral judgement on rain as on Stalin." He will argue that the collapse of Stalinism was "one of the great tragedi
Source: Independent (UK)
6-12-06
Mark Perlman was an influential historian of economic thought, the co-author with Charles McCann Jnr of The Pillars of Economic Understanding - the first volume published under the subtitle "Ideas and Traditions" (1998), the second as "Factors and Markets" (2000). He was also the founding editor ofthe Journal of Economic Literature, a leader in its genre, and created a journal for the US De-partmentofState, PortfolioonInterna-tionalEconomic Perspectives, as well as a journal
Source: Independent (UK)
6-12-06
As a church historian, Jaroslav Pelikan fought all his life to overcome Christians' amnesia of their own past - not only Protestants' ignorance of Reformation history, but Western Christians' ignorance of the Eastern Christian heritage, Christians' ignorance of Christianity's Jewish past and Christians' and Jews' ignorance of their Classical Greek heritage.
Pelikan's magnum opus was The Christian Tradition: ahistory of the development of doctrine, published in f
Source: Guardian
6-13-06
The French aren't noted for their willingness to defer to the Brits, but for John Keiger, professor of international history and director of the European Studies Research Institute at Salford University, they appear to be making an exception. "I do have a fair amount of experience of French and British university systems," he says, "so I suppose I have been brought in to bring an outsider's perspective to the issues and to stir things up. Employers and students have lost faith in
Source: Martin E. Marty in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin E. Marty Center at the University of Chiacgo
6-12-06
... Mark Noll, a superior historian who just moved from Wheaton College to the University of Notre Dame, knows Canadian religion as few U.S. scholars do, and made it the subject of his presidential address to the American Society of Church History, whose journal Church History (June 2006) published it. I hope my mention of it will prompt a visit to the library or the study of your friendly neighborhood church historian. Line one: "What happened to Christian Canada?" Line two: Noll a
Source: Bates College website
5-28-06
President Hansen, distinguished fellow honorees, Professor Garber, Dr. Ho, Mark Morris, accomplished faculty, proud parents and grandparents, friends and ladies and gentlemen of the graduating Class of 2006. The great Class of 2006 [applause]. And, I might say, after passing by you this morning, the great looking class of 2006 [laughter/applause].
I am tremendously pleased and complimented by this high honor and the privilege of taking part in your day of celebration, and in the tim
Source: Duke University Website
5-14-06
This is the day of leave-taking on the part of you who have completed your studies here at Duke University, and I was greatly honored, Mr. President, when you invited me several months ago to say a few words on this occasion. Despite the fact that I have been attending commencement exercises for some 75 years, I find them as exciting as ever and, indeed, as important as ever, not only for the graduating classes themselves, but for all who take this opportunity to appreciate once more
Source: Interview in Jerusalem Post by Ruthie Blum
6-9-06
In Israel last month to receive the "Guardian of Zion" award from Bar-Ilan University's Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies, Middle East scholar and author Daniel Pipes pulled no punches. In his acceptance speech at the King David Hotel before a distinguished gathering of academics, politicians, business people and the media, Pipes did something that - while perhaps, par for his own lonely course of late - was unconventional to say the least. It certainly strayed from the pro forma po
