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: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman Institute
12-31-69
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s long-awaited and widely acclaimed biography of the 16th President and his extraordinary Cabinet, has won the 2006 Lincoln Prize. Administered annually by the Lincoln and Soldiers Institute at Gettysburg College and endowed by philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, the Lincoln Prize is the nation’s most generous award in the field of American History.
Ms. Goodwin will be awarded
Source: Secrecy News, the newsletter written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
2-9-06
A long-simmering dispute over the role and character of the Congressional Research Service now threatens to boil over in the form of a clash between CRS management and CRS analyst Louis Fisher.
Fisher, a specialist in American government and separation of powers issues, is one of the superstars of the CRS, whose work is widely cited and universally respected by his academic colleagues.
He "is a national treasure, the foremost expert on the constitutional law of the
Source: WSJ
2-9-06
A dispute involving a researcher at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service is fueling a debate over whether analysts throughout the government are being muzzled to prevent criticism of Bush administration policies.
Louis Fisher, a 36-year veteran of the agency and an expert on the separation of powers, said his superiors wrongly punished him for giving interviews and publishing scholarly articles under his own name that contained criticism of the White House. Top officials d
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
2-8-06
Sitting at a table in a downtown restaurant here, Charles W. Ingrao is more than 4,500 miles away from Sarajevo. But as he talks with a reporter on a blustery January morning, Mr. Ingrao, a professor of history at Purdue University's main campus, could be sitting at a cafe in Bosnia and Herzegovina's capital. There's coffee and Coca-Cola on the table, and the rapid-fire conversation is thick with Balkan controversy and history. Only the fog of cigarette smoke found in any Bosnian cafe is missing
Source: Alexander H. Joffe at FrontPageMag.com
2-6-06
[Alexander H. Joffe is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
Cartoon Muhammads are all the rage. As threats and actual violence break out around the world over a Danish newspaper's irreverent de
Source: American Enterprise Online
David Hackett Fischer, one of our country’s foremost historians, has described his work as “a deep affirmation of American values.” He combines social history with classic narrative, a synthesis that reaches its apex in Paul Revere’s Ride (1994) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington’s Crossing (2004).
Fischer’s ambitious “cultural history of the United States” includes the much-praised Albion’s Seed (1989), which identifies the endu
Source: Seth Perry in the Chronicle of Higher Education
2-3-06
[Seth Perry is a Ph.D. student in the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] People often assume I'm a Mormon. I study the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and as a vanilla-white, clean-cut Midwesterner, I fit pretty well into the average person's mental picture of what a Mormon looks like. The response I get when I explain that my interest is purely academic and accidental — I really just stumbled onto the right book at the right time — depends on the person I'm talking to. Both non-Mormons and Mormons are intrigued: the former by the church, the latter by my interest. Non-Mormons often become conspiratorial, ready to get answers to everything they've always wanted to know about the secrets of Mormonism but were afraid to ask. Mormons assume that I have a leaning toward conversion, or at least a desire to celebrate their faith. Rare is the interlocutor who assumes an unvarnished academic interest.
Source: Star Pheonix (Canada)
2-2-06
Information uncovered by a University of Saskatchewan historian shows an aboriginal youth who was hung for murder was innocent of the crime. Assistant professor Keith Thor Carlson's research is the subject of a documentary entitled The Lynching of Louie Sam that was shown Wednesday night on campus.In 1884, an angry mob of men dressed in their wives' frocks, their faces streaked with aboriginal ceremonial paint, charged across the Canada-U.S. border from Washington to British
Source: Daily Review
2-2-06
A Univesity of California, Berkeley, art history professor has received a distinguished achievement award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that provides up to $1.5 million so he can further his scholarly pursuits.Timothy Clark, a leading authority on modern art, is one of four humanities scholars chosen for the award. Besides his scholarly work, which includes criticism and research on Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso, Clark was singled out as an outstand
Source: WKTY (Lexington, KY)
2-1-06
A University of Kentucky history professor and author has died. Lance Banning was nationally known as an expert on the period of American history from the American Revolution to the U-S Constitution.Banning died yesterday at U-K Hospital in Lexington. He was 64.
Banning was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book "The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic." He also wrote a book about the conflict betw
Source: Providence Journal
1-30-06
The state's historic lead paint lawsuit may go to the six-person jury next week, and if it does, the jurors will be asked to believe such widely varying images of the four corporations being sued that it may sound like two trials were held.The state rested its case on Thursday morning. The defendants did the same minutes later, without calling a single witness.
The diverging views after the three-month trial came in legal arguments made by the defendants'
Source: New Republic
1-26-06
... When Eugene Genovese appeared on the scene in the early 1960s, scholarly interest in the Civil War--even amid its centennial--seemed at low ebb, the interpretive literature was still dominated by the "consensus perspective" that had emerged in the 1940s and 1950s, and our understanding of African American slavery was only beginning to detach itself from the hold of Southern apologists. With The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), and then with The World the Slaveholders Made (1969
Source: Connection Newspaper (VA)
1-26-06
The biggest defeat of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life was when he tried to speak in the Chicago suburbs of Kenilworth and Cicero in 1966 and '67, said author James Loewen. King was never allowed to speak in Kenilworth, and he and his marchers were met by such violent animosity at the border of Cicero that they never made it into town, in spite of the 2,000 police escorting them.
What these two towns had in common, said Loewen, was that they were "sundown towns."
Source: Harvard Crimson
1-28-06
Forced to resign his post, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby said on Friday night that he will step down on June 30 at the end of four turbulent years in which he quickly lost favor with many Faculty members and, ultimately, his boss.
The dean was fired by University President Lawrence H. Summers, according to four people close to the central administration. Kirby’s announcement, between semesters at the College, leaves the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in limbo as the school con
Source: Announcement from Dr. Horensia Calvo, director of the Tulane Latin American Library
1-27-06
Distinguished scholar and emeritus professor of Latin American History, Richard E. Greenleaf, has given $500,000 to The Latin American Library at Tulane University. The Richard E. Greenleaf Fellowship will provide short-term visits each year for scholars from any country in Latin America to conduct research at The Latin American Library. In addition, the Richard E. Greenleaf Endowment Fund will support restoration or replacement of materials from The Latin American Library’s holdings damaged b
Source: EJP
1-25-06
French historian and genocide specialist Yves Ternon tells the European Jewish Press why over 400 historians are demanding the removal of anti-revisionist laws.EJP: Over 400 historians have signed a petition demanding the removal of four “historical laws”. One of these texts, voted on February 2005, includes a controversial article on the “positive aspect of colonialism”, but the other three prohibit genocide denial and discrimination. Why would historians want these anti-re
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
1-26-06
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on Wednesday challenging a provision of the USA Patriot Act that was used to deny a visa to at least one prominent foreign scholar, Tariq Ramadan. The provision allowed the federal government to bar him, the ACLU asserts, solely because the Bush administration disapproved of his political views.
In August 2004, Mr. Ramadan, an influential professor of Islamic studies and philosophy whose home is in Geneva, Switzerland, was informed
Source: NYT
1-24-06
Joan Maynard, who shepherded the preservation of the remnants of Weeksville, a once-thriving 19th-century community of free blacks in Brooklyn that had faded from maps and memory, died on Sunday at her home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She was 77.
Her death was confirmed by Pamela Green, her successor as executive director of the Society for the Preservation of Weeksville and Bedford-Stuyvesant History.
The story of Weeksville's discovery and preservation sounds like a f
Source: NYT
1-23-06
When President Bush met with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany in the Oval Office this month, the talk turned to Ms. Merkel's childhood under Communism, then wandered to the subject of Mr. Bush's latest bedtime reading: "Mao: The Unknown Story," an 814-page biography that presents the Chinese dictator as another Hitler or Stalin.
Participants in the meeting say Mr. Bush spoke glowingly of the book, a 10-year project by Jung Chang, the author of the hugely successful memo
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education Forum: 'Becoming' a Nazi to study Nazis?
1-24-06
I post again to thank those scholars who have taken the time to comment on my work, whether in agreement or disagreement. One of my primary aims was to engender debate, and I've clearly done that, even though I did not anticipate the debate would begin until the publication of my research (probably in about a year). Yet I continue to be surprised by the reactions of those commentators who have not grasped that carrying on research in a post-modern, post-structural mode means bending the rules of
