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: Der Spiegal
1-18-06
British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving, arrested last month in Austria where his views are illegal, is busy preparing his trial in a Vienna prison. Could this be the eccentric Hitler admirer's final act of provocation?At night, when the pale winter sun has slipped behind the rooftops of Vienna's Josefstadt district, a jungle comes to life in the prison yard at the city's old Imperial-era prison. "That's when they start yelling from the windows and t
Source: Press Release -- Rutgers University
1-18-06
NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – Dr. Richard P. McCormick, one of the most accomplished and beloved scholars, educators, administrators and social activists in the 240-year history of Rutgers University, has died after an extended illness. He was 89.
Professor Emeritus McCormick, who first came to Rutgers as an undergraduate in 1934, served the university community and the state of New Jersey with distinction for more than 60 years as a professor of history, university historian, d
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
1-16-06
Last week the literary world got a double dose of scandal with revelations of two high-profile fabrications: Memoirist James Frey's past, it turns out, is considerably duller than his books suggest; and novelist JT Leroy, it appears, does not exist at all.
Now the academic world has yielded up its own fabrication, this one involving neo-Nazis, a white supremacist radio show, a professor's firing, and a flap over academic freedom. But this time the unmasking was self-inflicted.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
1-16-06
The strange story of Jacques Pluss just got stranger.
In March, Pluss was fired from his position as an adjunct professor of history at Fairleigh Dickinson University shortly after it became known that he had become a leader of the National Socialist Movement of the United States, which is also known as the American Nazi Party. Students and colleagues at the New Jersey institution were stunned, but Pluss could be heard on Nazi radio broadcasts and made racist and anti-Semitic commen
Source: Press of Atlantic City
1-17-06
A noted New Jersey historian and former longtime Rutgers professor whose son now leads the university has died. Richard P. McCormick was 89.
McCormick died Monday after an extended illness, the university said in a statement Tuesday.
He first arrived at the public university in 1934 as an undergraduate, and, with the exception of a stay at the University of Pennsylvania to earn his doctoral degree in the 1940s, McCormick spent most of his career at Rutgers.
During h
Source: NYT
1-15-06
Milton Himmelfarb, a leading essayist for Commentary and other publications who was known for his well wrought and witty observations on Jewish affairs, died on Jan. 4 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was 87 and lived in White Plains.
The cause was complications of skin cancer, his nephew William Kristol said.
Mr. Himmelfarb was a member of an astonishingly accomplished intellectual clan with working-class and liberal roots that evolved into ne
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
1-14-06
Cliff Kuhn first encountered the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot when he wrote a column for an alternative newspaper called "The History You Weren't Supposed to Know."
Thirty years later, the Georgia State University historian is still trying to shed light on the city's worst outbreak of racial violence. "Most Atlantans have never heard of it," he says.
This year marks the centennial of the riot, in which thousands of whites rampaged through downtown At
Source: The Guardian (London)
1-17-06
John Bierman, who has died aged 76, was one of the last of a generation of buccaneering reporters and writers who pursued successful careers across the media. Newspaper reporter, editor, radio correspondent, television "fireman", documentary maker and, finally, acclaimed historian, Bierman excelled at each, in a working life that reached back to the days of plate cameras and reporters in trilbies.
He was fast, fluent, accurate and - beneath a forbidding carapace - a widely
Source: The Guardian (London)
1-17-06
No one could accuse Lisa Jardine of being slow to get to the point. Barely has she parked herself on the sofa of her Bloomsbury apartment than she announces, "You know I had breast cancer and was out for most of last year." No calls for sympathy, no easing gently into the subject; just cards on the table from the off.
Even so, you should be careful about taking Jardine at face value. After surgery, followed by gruelling courses of radio and chemotherapy, out for most peopl
Source: HNN
1-15-06
In an exclusive story published by the History News Network, historian Jacques Pluss claimed that last year he orchestrated a damning leak that he was a Neo-Nazi in order to infiltrate the group for a research project. After the leak he was fired by Fairleigh Dickinson University. The case attracted national headlines.
Click here to read the story--"Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi":http://hnn.us/arti
Allegations of conservative political bias at the National Endowment of the Humanities have been made over the last several years, but few scholars have come forward to tell their stories. On Saturday 7 January, at a panel sponsored by the American Historical Association Professional Division, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, and the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, historian of sexuality Marc Stein, an associate professor at York University in Toronto, went public.
Una
Source: Cliopatria, HNN Blog
1-12-06
Chris Bray, a member of HNN blog, Cliopatria, is a graduate student in history at UCLA, now on duty in Kuwait with the US Army.
Beginning this week he plans on blogging about the Iraq War.
He writes:
"First, these observations come secondhand; I'm nominally an infantry sergeant, but am currently parked at a not-very-interesting desk job in Kuwait. What I write here comes from what I've read, what I've observed at the periphery of the war, what I've e
Source: Knight Ridder
1-12-06
This week, in a nod to the 120th meeting of the American Historical Association, the National Constitution Center hosted three celebratory Ben Franklin biographers: Gordon Wood, Walter Isaacson and Stacy Schiff.
Philadelphia's David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biographer, wasn't among the honored guests. That's despite his well-reviewed "Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
Source: The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
1-11-06
Alethea Hayter, who died yesterday aged 94, was a critic and biographer who wrote mainly about literary society in 19th-century England; Julian Barnes called her "one of our finest non-academic literary historians'', and her study Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968) is considered a definitive account of the contribution made by narcotics to literary creation.
Opium in its medicinal form of laudanum was widely used as a pain-killer from the late 18th century onwards, but w
Source: Brooklyn College
1-6-06
Barbara B. Heyman, a music historian who most recently was director of the Office of College Information and Publications at Brooklyn College, has been awarded a 2006 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Founded in 1965, the NEH is an independent federal agency and is the largest funder of humanities projects undertaken by museums, archives, libraries, public television, and independent scholars.
Heyman receives a grant of $40,000 to support research for her book, A C
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
1-11-06
[In two books, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Westview Press, 1999), anthropologist Derek Freeman claimed that Mead had been duped to believe that Somoans believed in free love and clamed that her own desire to vindicate her mentor's theories of human development led her astray. Now Freeman's the one who has been put on the couch.]
Source: Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Education
1-10-06
[Conrad Crane is director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute. He appeared at a panel on military history at the AHA this past weekend.]
Crane’s work relates more directly to Iraq. A West Point graduate (with a Stanford University Ph.D.), Crane spent most of his career in the Army, including nine years teaching at his alma mater. When he left the Army, he said he had a hard time getting hired as a scholar by the Army War College because, he said, “they assumed a historian w
Source: NYT
1-9-06
Two months ago, Time magazine jumped at the chance to make a deal with Simon & Schuster for the exclusive serial rights to "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68," the third volume in Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the civil rights movement that is to come out tomorrow.
"I moved quickly on it because I think it's a terrific book, it's long awaited, it's very dramatic," said Stephen J. Koepp, the deputy managing editor at Time.
Source: NYT
1-8-06
... Anyone who doubts the value of Shelby's criticisms of black cultural identity politics should read Nell Irvin Painter's textbook on African-American history, "Creating Black Americans." With the odd exception of the field of economics, writing textbooks is not an especially prestigious undertaking in the historical and social sciences. So the decision of a distinguished scholar like Painter to publish one is to be welcomed, especially by college students burdened with books churned
Source: Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer
1-8-06
Memo to scholarly critics of Ben Franklin: Go fly a kite. At noon today, in a nod to the 120th meeting of the American Historical Association, which has been raising Center City's tweed factor all week, the National Constitution Center will host three celebratory Ben Franklin biographers: Gordon Wood, Walter Isaacson and Stacy Schiff. [They will appear in a show hosted by PBS's Jim Lehrer.]
Philadelphia's own David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biograph
