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: David Horowitz at frontpagemag.com
5-19-06
Back in 2004, Joel Beinin, a professor of Middle East history at Stanford University, wrote a long and outraged article inveighing against what he called “intense policing to regulate what may be thought and said about the Middle East” in which he attacked critics of increasingly radicalized Middle Eastern Studies departments for daring to state their views. Now Beinin has become the policeman he once scorned.
In March, in a move clearly designed to obstruct opinions he didn’t like
Source: Bruce Craig in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
5-19-06
With his book "The House: The History of the House of Representatives" now off his desk and available in bookstores across the country, Historian of the House Robert Remini is turning his attention to building an historian's office that he hopes one day will mirror the Senate's in terms of recognition, staffing, and budget.
Remini, who was asked to take the position by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), has now headed the House history office for about a year. Pri
Source: NYT
5-19-06
Peter Viereck, a noted historian, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a founder of the mid-20th-century American conservative movement who later denounced what he saw as its late-20th-century excesses, died on Saturday at his home in South Hadley, Mass. He was 89.
A specialist in Russian history, Professor Viereck was an emeritus professor at Mount Holyoke College, where he had taught since 1948. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for his first collection of poems, "Terror an
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, HNN Blog
5-15-06
I promise you that Jaroslav Pelikan is dead. He died two days ago. You may have heard it here first. And he'd better be dead, because the Orthodox intend to bury him tomorrow. But tell me: what other former president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences would be two days dead and not have an obit in the New York Times? What other Jefferson Lecturer would die and not have it noticed in the Washington Post? What other Gifford Lecturer would die without a notice in the London Times? What ot
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
5-16-06
[Scott Gac is a Ph.D. in American history who is in the final year of a postdoc at Yale University. His first book, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Reform, is due out in May 2007 from Yale University Press.]
... Hope had governed the early stages of my job search this year. Using my three years of experience on the market as a guide, I thought long and hard about how to present myself in the cover letters that would lead to my
Source: Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
5-16-06
The historian Douglas Brinkley's harrowing new book, "The Great Deluge," captures the human toll of Katrina as graphically as the most vivid newspaper and television accounts did, and by pulling together a huge, choral portrait of what happened during that first week of havoc and distress (from Saturday, Aug. 27, through Saturday, Sept. 3), he gives the reader a richly detailed timeline of disaster — a timeline in which the sheer cumulative power of details impresses upon us, again, ju
Source: Ira Berlin in the NYT Book Review
5-14-06
... [T]he publication of David Brion Davis's "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World" could not be more welcome. As much as any single scholar, Davis, a professor emeritus and the former director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, has made slavery a central element in modern historiography. Although the focus of "Inhuman Bondage" is largely on the Americas, he appreciates that the slavery
Source: NYT
5-16-06
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, a Yale scholar and historian of religion who interpreted Christian tenets to a vast lay audience in the English-speaking world, died on Saturday at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 82.
The cause was lung cancer, said his son Michael.
A prolific author of essays and nearly 40 books, Dr. Pelikan joined the Yale faculty in 1962 and was appointed Sterling professor of history 10 years later. He wrote more than a dozen reference works covering the entir
Source: David S. Brown in the LAT. (Mr. Brown is an associate professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author of "Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography," published last month)
5-14-06
THERE IS a certain mystique to Richard Hofstadter. For nearly 30 years, the legend goes, he wrote the best books, for the best publisher, won the best prizes and taught in the best city, at the best school, at the best time. Among his fellow historians, the memory of his brilliant three-decade tenure at Columbia University beginning just after World War II evokes a hazy attachment to a lost world of scholarly giants confident in the curative powers of the enlightened mind.
This was
Source: Inside Higher Ed
5-10-06
... Democracy Past and Future, the selection of [French Thinker Pierre Rosanvallon's] writings just published by Columbia University Press, provides a long overdue introduction to a figure who defies both sound bites and the familiar academic division of labor. Born in 1948, he spent much of the 1970s as a sort of thinker-in-residence for a major trade union, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, for which he organized seminars and conferences seeking to create a non-Marxist “seco
Source: Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker
5-8-06
... What is missing from the Nixon Library and Birthplace is an actual library. In 1974, Congress impounded forty-four million of Nixon’s Presidential papers and almost four thousand hours of his tapes. There was an entirely reasonable belief at the time that Nixon could not be trusted with his own papers. So the California library was opened, in 1990, without the documentary record of Nixon’s Presidency. It was administered not by the National Archives, which oversees the nation’s eleven other
Source: Nation
5-22-06
Eric Foner has begun a one year term as president of SAH.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
5-11-06
At a Tehran airport on April 27, Iranian police arrested Ramin Jahanbegloo, a French-educated scholar who directs the department of contemporary thought at the Cultural Research Bureau, a think tank in Tehran. Mr. Jahanbegloo is the author of books on Hegel, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Isaiah Berlin; he has been a fellow at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Toronto.
No formal charges have been issued, but newspapers aligned with the Iranian regime have denounced Mr
Source: San Jose Mercury News
5-10-06
As one of Stanford University's most respected Middle East scholars, professor Joel Beinin knows what terrorism looks like.
So it was a shock when he saw his own face on the cover of a new book titled ``Campus Support for Terrorism,'' linking him to radical Islam.
He's suing the book's publishers in what is the first counteroffensive by a professor against a growing campaign by conservative groups targeting left-leaning college educators.
Conservative group
Source: Interviewer Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com
5-9-06
His short hair and mustache are heavily flecked with grey, but he still retains the stocky, powerful build of a butcher's son, who once, long ago, hauled animal carcasses for his father in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon. At a moment's notice, he puts you in his four-wheel drive and takes you out to San Diego's McMansion exurbs or down to the Mexican border and right up to the new, controversial triple fence just being erected (where you have a passing run-in with the Border Patrol). He is th
Source: "Facts Count," a response to David Horowitz's book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America
5-9-06
["Facts Count" was prepared by Free Exchange. The introduction to the website where the following entry was posted says: "Free Exchange has taken a close look at David Horowitz’s new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and found a trail of errors and misrepresentations. We will be documenting these here at Free Exchange with interviews and analyses based on the book. Each response will be archived to help readers see how inaccurate Horowitz’s represe
Source: San Antonio Express-News
5-9-06
A historian dismisses some of the changes anti-immigration groups want as simplistic and ill-informed.
Source: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
5-9-06
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran
c/o H.E. Javad Zarif
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
Fax: 212-867-7086
Your Excellency:
We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the Committee on Academic and Intellectual Freedom of the Internat
Source: AHA Perspectives (May 2006)
5-1-06
Over the past few months, the National History Center has been gathering additional momentum, launching new programs while continuing older ones, thanks to two new developments. The first is the appointment of Miriam E. Hauss as administrative officer to manage the growing day-to-day work of the center. The second is the recruitment of Robert Berendt, an experienced consultant, to help draw up a strategic plan for the center, an essential step that has now been facilitated by grants from David R
Source: AHA Perspectives (May 2006)
5-1-06
Wherever historians gather, the conversation often turns to a discussion of why there seems to be such a distance between professional historians and the general public. For most historians working today, the relationship seemed to hit a nadir in the late 1990s with closed museum exhibits and rejected school curricula. As Ian Tyrrell, professor of history at the University of New South Wales, reminds us in his new book, Historians in Public: The Practice of American History, 1890–1970 (Universit
