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: Chronicle of Higher Education
3-10-06
Robin D.G. Kelley, the well-known African-American studies scholar, is not getting a raise or any other perks when he leaves Columbia University for the University of Southern California this summer. So why is he bailing out on the Ivy League?
Mr. Kelley says Columbia's history department shunned him — forcing him to take an appointment in anthropology when he joined the faculty in 2003.
"I'm sort of tired of being at an institution where my own department doesn't
Source: National Coalition for History
3-10-06
The National History Center launches the first Congressional seminar of the second session of Congress this Monday 13 March from 4-6 pm in the Senate Russell Building in Washington D.C. with presentations by Eric Foner of Columbia University and John Hope Franklin of Duke University. Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture will moderate the session titled,"Revisting Race and Reconstruction: What is the Federal Government Role?"
The semi
Source: Email circulating on the Internet
3-9-06
[Miguel Tinker-Salas is Arango Professor in Latin American History and Professor of History and Chicano/a Studies at Pomona College.]
Estimado/as Colegas,
I write to inform you that yesterday during my
office hours (Tuesday 2:30-4:30) I was visited by
two agents of the LA County Sherrifs/FBI Joint Task
Force on Terrorism (JTFT).
The arrived at about 2:40-2:45 pm sat out side my office
while attended to a students, and then asked to see me.
They had with them a
Source: Benjamin Balint in the WSJ
3-9-06
... Walter Laqueur arrived in Jerusalem in 1938 as a 17-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany, stayed until the mid-1950s and has made frequent visits ever since. As an eminent historian whose many works include "A History of Zionism" (1987), he is familiar with what he calls the "surfeit of history" in a city that has known innumerable desecrations, conquests and sieges in the 30 centuries since David made it his capital.
But in "Dying for Jerusalem," Mr. Laque
Source: Australian
3-9-06
AUSTRALIAN historian Henry Reynolds has defended the doctrine of terra nullius, insisting that while the High Court did not rely on his view of white settlement for its Mabo decision, it nonetheless endorsed the controversial theory.
Under attack from dissident historian Michael Connor, who published his book The Invention of Terra Nullius in December, Professor Reynolds maintains British settlers never recognised the property rights of Aborigines.
''The one, utterly u
Source: Mark Bourrie,in the Ottawa Citizen
3-6-06
[Mark Bourrie is an independent journalist and a PhD student in modern Canadian media and European history at the University of Ottawa.]
The Nazi party was in decline when it came to power in 1933. The party's membership numbers were stagnant and its popular vote was beginning to slip. But in the Weimar Republic's Reichstag, moderate centrist and leftist parties could not form a working coalition.
In sheer numbers, the Communists were the fastest-rising threat to the st
Source: Financial Times (UK)
3-6-06
Max Gallo, the waspish and prolific historian who has penned vivid portraits of ex-emperor Napoleon and former president Charles de Gaulle, has had enough of the country's "self-flagellation".
In a new polemic, entitled PROUD to be French (sic), Gallo glories in the virtues of France's republican model and the innate wisdom of its peoples.
As the son of an Italian immigrant, Gallo has a preference for pasta and parmesan over poulet. But he expresses immense p
Source: Inside Higher Ed
3-7-06
Academic freedom is facing its most serious threats since the McCarthy era, according to essays in Academic Freedom After September 11, published this month by Zone Books. Essays in the book — which come from scholars such as Joel Beinin, Judith Butler and Robert Post — both focus on current issues and offer a historical perspective. Beshara Doumani, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley who edited the volume, recently responded to questions about its themes.
Source: Irish Examiner
3-7-06
Right-wing British historian David Irving, who was convicted by an Austrian court of denying the Holocaust, has been barred from speaking with the press, a court spokeswoman said today.Since a Vienna state court found Irving guilty last month and sentenced him to three years in prison, he has spoken to several news organisations.
Alexandra Mathes, spokeswoman for the court, said it was unusual for a judge to grant reporters the right to interview a convict in th
12-31-69
SOURCE: Archaeology (March-April 2006)
[Archaeologist Susanne] Osthoff's reception among fellow Germans since her release on December 19 has been chilly. Although Berlin has been mum on the issue of a ransom, Osthoff acknowledged that there was a payment to her kidnappers; news reports estimate it to be around $5 million.""This was all very different from the praise Osthoff has received from the archaeological community. She has been characterized as an intrepid and tireless caretaker of a
Source: pennlive.com
3-6-06
LANCASTER - Stephan Williams taught history with wit and casual style, his students said, but his bosses weren't charmed.
Williams became noted at the Lancaster Campus of Harrisburg Area Community College for classroom discussions on Abraham Lincoln's sexuality. He used the occasional curse word. A student described him as "a guy you could almost see yourself sharing a beer with while talking about history."
Williams no longer teaches at the school in East L
Source: Susan Cooke Kittredge
3-6-06
Ten days before Christmas, I received a call from a detective with the Brooklyn district attorney's office. He wondered if I had heard anything about the office's investigation into the illegal sale of more than 1,000 bodies by several funeral homes in the area. I told him I had not. He went on to explain that the bodies were stolen and parts of them sold to several different processing plants. It sounded macabre, and I don't really remember much more after he said, "We have evidence that y
Source: Austin Statesman
3-3-06
As a scholar of early Greek culture and writing, Thomas Palaima knows well the story of the plague that the god Apollo visits upon the Greek army in Homer's "Iliad."
Greek king Agamemnon's insulting treatment of a priest is to blame, but nobody has the courage to explain this to Agamemnon. Only when the warrior Achilles promises to provide protection from Agamemnon does the prophet Calchas agree to speak up.
It's still true today: Most people are reluctant t
Source: Frontpagemag.com
3-3-06
Frontpage Interview's guest today is Daniel Mandel, a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and Director of the ZOA Center for Middle East Policy. He is the author of the new book, H.V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist. FP: Daniel Mandel welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Mandel: Pleasure to be here, Jamie.FP: What inspired you to write this book?Mandel: I'm a historian with a long interest in the mak
Source: Jacob Laksin at Frontpagemag.com
3-3-06
There were heated denunciations of the American government, angry pleas for the immediate arrest of American imperialism, and widespread support for more aggressive political activism to resist the injustices daily perpetrated by America abroad and at home. It was no run-of-the-mill anti-war hate fest but the first national conference of Historians Against the War (HAW), events more closely related than they may at first appear.
HAW, notwithstanding its claims to scholarly prestige, is an ac
Source: NYT
3-3-06
After complaints from historians, the National Archives directed intelligence agencies on Thursday to stop removing previously declassified historical documents from public access and urged them to return to the shelves as quickly as possible many of the records they had already pulled.
Allen Weinstein, the nation's chief archivist, announced what he called a "moratorium" on reclassification of documents until an audit can be completed to determine which records should be
Source: NYT
3-2-06
Arnold A. Rogow, an author and political scientist who trained as a psychoanalyst to gain insight into historical figures like Alexander Hamilton, died on Feb. 14 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital in Manhattan. He was 81.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Jeanne Rogow said.
Mr. Rogow, a professor at City College of New York, argued in his book "A Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr" (Hill and Wang, 1998) that Hamilto
Source: Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed
3-1-06
Two images of William Jennings Bryan have settled into the public memory, neither of them flattering. One is the fundamentalist mountebank familiar to viewers of Inherit the Wind, with its fictionalized rendering of the Scopes trial. In it, the character based on Bryan proclaims himself “more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks.” He is, in short, a crowd-pleasing creationist numbskull, and nothing more.
The other portrait of Bryan is less cinematic, but darker. The
Source: Haaretz
2-28-06
British historian David Irving, who began last week serving a three-year prison sentence in Austria for Holocaust denial, repeated Tuesday earlier claims that he does not believe Hitler systematically worked to annihilate European Jewry.In an attempt reduce his prison sentence, Irving claimed during his trial that he had changed his mind since comments he made in 1989 - for which he was convicted - and insisted he believes today that the Holocaust indeed took place and that
Source: Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
2-28-06
Toward the end of her freshman year at Yale, Molly Worthen, who was taking a history and politics seminar with Professor Charles Hill, wrote on the inside cover of her notebook: "Charles Hill is God."
She was not alone in her adulation. As Ms. Worthen, class of 2003, tells it, Mr. Hill was something of an icon on the Yale campus — revered as a wise man by his ardent disciples and reviled by others as a reactionary cult figure. "His pedagogy is Puritan, fashioned arou
