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: Jewish Week
6-2-06
Juan Cole, one of the country’s top Middle East scholars, was poised for the biggest step of his career.
A tenured professor at the University of Michigan, Cole was tapped earlier this year by a Yale University search committee to teach about the modern Middle East. In two separate votes in May, Cole was approved by both the sociology and history departments, the latter the university’s largest.
The only remaining hurdle was the senior appointments committee, also know
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, HNN Blog
6-5-06
Let me give you a hypothetical: Let's say that, at a major research university, its program in modern European history had aged to the point that it had only one remaining senior scholar in the field. The institution decides that it wants to strengthen its program in modern European history. Its remaining senior Europeanist recommends to his colleagues and administrators that a respected scholar from another institution be hired. When he does that, however, word goes out from hostile quarters:"Y
Source: Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Weekly Standard
6-5-06
[Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.]
IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT the United States isn't easy on its scholars and public intellectuals--that they are not accorded the prestige and respect that they are given in the Old World. This complaint, usually made by left-wingers struggling against the tide in the United States, isn't totally without merit. A good literary scholar or classicist in the United
Source: Inside Higher Ed
6-5-06
S. Frederick Starr is by any measure that rare academic whose success mixes administrative work (former president of Oberlin College and the Aspen Institute) and top-level scholarship (leading expert on the Soviet Union, Russia and the countries in Central Asia that were created when the Soviet Union fell apart). A talented jazz musician, he’s also mixed that interest with his scholarship — and his lectures and op-eds make him a highly successful public intellectual as well.
In the
Source: Inside Higher Ed
6-5-06
One of the most closely watched — and criticized — faculty searches this academic year is ending with Juan Cole apparently being rejected for a post in Middle Eastern history at Yale University.
Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and president of the Middle East Studies Association. He also has one of the largest audiences of Middle Eastern studies experts through his blog, Informed Comment, on which he publishes numerous updates a day about events in the M
Source: Graphic Ghana
6-1-06
The Dean of Graduate Studies of the University of Cape Coast, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, has stressed the need to further examine the physical and material evidence of the slave trade in order to tell a better story about that inhumane experience.
According to her, the story of the slave trade had hardly been told and re-addressing that history was relevant in giving power to Africans both at home and abroad.
“It is important to emphasise that, perhaps, some Afric
Source: Vanguard
6-4-06
Professor Ernest Emenyonu, a notable critic, theorist and writer is chair, Africana Studies of The University of Michigan, Flint in the United States of America. As a critic, Professor Emenyonu has written very constructive works that have added meaning and depth to the Igbo, Nigerian and African literature. His very important landmark critical work, The Rise of The Igbo Novel, is no doubt one of the most important studies not only in Igbo indigenous literature, but has also helped in igniting
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, HNN Blog
6-2-06
Conservative siteson the net are enthusiastically reporting that Juan Cole of Informed Comment and the University of Michigan has been denied an appointment at Yale. The appointment would have been to Yale's Center for International and Area Studies, with affiliations in history and sociol
Source: Martin Kramer at Sandbox (blog)
6-3-06
Professor Juan Cole has produced another offensive quote, which appears in an article about the academic boycott of Israel: "If Israelis want to be a state, they, both genders, should take the criticism like men and stop being crybabies about 'anti-Semitism.'"
Here is news for Cole: Israel has been a state for nearly sixty years. Its founders included victims of the worst antisemitism. But Israelis of both genders earned their statehood not by whining like crybabies, but b
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, HNN Blog
5-31-06
There is, undoubtedly, much to admire and respect about our fellow historian, S. Frederick Starr. He's the author of nearly two dozen books, including Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1980 (1983); and Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1995). He's had a distinguished administrative career, as Vice President of Academic Affairs at Tulane (1980-81) and
Source: Martin Kramer at Sandbox (blog)
5-31-06
The late Edward Said, the Palestinian-American icon, described the role of the intellectual as"speaking truth to power." In that spirit, many Palestinian academics and thinkers broke with Yasir Arafat and Fatah, accusing them of corruption and compromise.These intellectuals are nearly all secularists, who've long insisted to the world that the cause of Palestine is also the cause of revolution, equality, and democracy. So now that Hamas rules, are these intellectuals speaking the same tr
Source: Boston Magazine(June Issue)
6-1-06
Probably the first sign that Larry Summers was in more than his usual trouble was the standing ovation the faculty gave to Bill Kirby, the dean the Harvard president had just forced out.
It was late in the afternoon of Tuesday, February 7, and the Harvard faculty had gathered on the second floor of University Hall in Harvard Yard. Faculty meetings usually attract only a few dozen professors, but on this day the Faculty Room was packed.
Tension had been building on cam
Source: Wilfred M. McClay in the NY Sun
5-15-06
[Mr. McClay teaches history and humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.]
"The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" (William Morrow, 736 pages, $29.95) is the historian Douglas Brinkley's bid for literary and historical greatness. Hoping to follow in the footsteps of David McCullough, whose fine book on the Johnstown flood established his sterling historical reputation, Mr. Brinkley has sought to create an instant epic, pa
Source: Christopher Shea in the Boston Globe
5-28-06
RICHARD HOFSTADTER'S ``The American Political Tradition," originally published in 1948 when the author was 32, still sells 10,000 copies a year-an astonishing figure, especially for an essay collection lacking an overarching theme. Yet its sharp biographical sketches have struck generations of readers as revelatory: Hofstadter's Teddy Roosevelt is a bloodthirsty, sham progressive; his Abraham Lincoln a careful cultivator of his own legend as a self-made man. Hofstadter's revisionism is so a
Source: Berkeley Daily Planet
5-26-06
Willa Klug Baum, an internationally respected oral historian, passed away on May 18, 2006, following back surgery. Her pioneering work in oral history methodology and interview techniques served as the foundation for the establishment and growth of oral history as a unique academic discipline.
(found via) ....
Willa was also instrumental in establishing oral history as an accepted disc
Source: frontpagemag.com
5-25-06
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Larry Schweikart, the co-author of A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror. He is a professor of history at the University of Dayton and has written more than 20 books on national defense, business, and financial history. He is the author of the new book,
Source: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman
5-24-06
The second annual George Washington Book Prize was awarded at Mount Vernon on May 23 to Stacy Schiff for her book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. The $50,000 prize honors the most important new book about the founding era. Schiff, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography, tells the story of the eight years Benjamin Franklin spent in France beginning in 1776.
“In this time of renewed interest in the founding period, it is especially gratify
Source: Wa Po
5-24-06
Biographer Stacy Schiff has won the second annual George Washington Book Prize for "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America" -- walking away with $50,000 and proving once again that the Founding Father industry is alive and well.
Walter Isaacson, one of three prize judges and himself a Benjamin Franklin biographer, praised Schiff's book yesterday as an unusual combination of "great spadework" and "literate narrative." Franklin
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
5-21-06
Georgia's expulsion of the Cherokees was executed with swift, military precision. In three short weeks in the late spring of 1838, members of the Georgia Militia arrested several thousand men, women and children, evicted them from their homes in North Georgia, and marched them to military camps in Tennessee for resettlement.
The removal of the Cherokees in Georgia — and later that summer in neighboring states — marked the start of what history now calls the Trail of Tears.
Source: Diane Coutu interview with Robert Caro in Harvard Business Review
5-15-06
Editor's note: Historian Robert A. Caro is a student of power, leadership, and the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. In this Harvard Business Review excerpt from Diane Coutu's interview, Caro discusses Johnson's strategy for getting close to powerful people.
Why should business executives be interested in the life of Lyndon Johnson?
As far as I'm concerned, biography is a tool for understanding power: how it is acquired and how it is used
