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: Baton Rouge Advocate
1-8-06
Historian Douglas Brinkley, who is writing a book about Hurricane Katrina, lived through the deadly storm and has been studying it ever since.
Among the unsung heroes, Brinkley said, are those anonymous boat operators -- dubbed the Cajun navy -- who navigated their private fishing boats and other vessels through flooded New Orleans to lend a hand after the hurricane hit.
The sight of it all made him rethink his view of some laborers.
"I saw guys cha
Source: Brandeis University
1-6-06
Historian David Hackett Fischer, who has played a pivotal role in reviving popular and academic interest in American history and its lessons for the present, has been selected to receive the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award for 2006. He will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at the Institute’s annual dinner on March 8, 2006, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.Professor Fischer is a pioneer among historians who are com
1-6-06
Mark Carnes, professor of history at Barnard, has received the American Historical Association's award for the the best article on teaching history.
The article, entitled"Inciting Speech," can be read at the following link:
www.barnard.edu/reacting/commentary.htm.
The article describes an innovaative approach Mr. Carnes developed to help students understand the past:"Reacting to the Past."
"Reacting to the Past," pi
Source: Time Magazine
1--1-06
TIME: This is almost a dual biography of two lions—Martin Luther King, Jr., and Lyndon Johnson—very powerful men who are being marginalized. Why did you decide to do it that way?
Taylor Branch: Well, of course, some of that is imposed by the history. I mean, there's the fact that the first Marine combat units land within hours of the first march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge [in Selma. Ala.] You've got the march in Selma and the landing of the troops in Danang, both with garlands a
Source: BBC News
1-4-06
David Irving, the infamous British war historian, is today sitting in an Austrian jail, accused of denying the Nazi Holocaust. So why is an American Jewish academic who dramatically crushed Irving in the British courts saying he should be released?
When you ask Professor Deborah Lipstadt for her thoughts on David Irving's forthcoming trial, the very last thing you expect her to say is: "Let the guy go home. He has spent enough time in prison."
Lipstadt, the
Source: New Yorker
1-2-06
On the train up from Philadelphia the other day, Bryant Simon, a professor of history at Temple University, overheard two conversations about Starbucks. When he reached Penn Station, he made a pit stop at the Starbucks at Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue. Then he began walking toward Grand Central, to catch a Metro-North train uptown, and passed a group of kids on the street, also talking about Starbucks. (“I guess a lot of people like twelve-dollar coffee,” one said.) He was headed for th
Source: The New Zealand Herald
1-4-06
Massey University historian James Watson was awarded an "Ig-Nobel" in October for his investigation of why Hawera farmer Richard Buckley's trousers exploded in August 1931.
Before you laugh, the study wasn't obscure, nor was it lightweight - more on that in a moment.
And the Ig-Nobels themselves are not a complete mickey-take: the annual awards, say organisers, are given out to those whose work first makes you laugh, then makes you think.
Dr Watso
Source: South Coast Today
12-30-05
The story of the UMass Dartmouth undergrad who lied about being questioned by agents for the Department of Homeland Security had everything.
It played directly into the split between Red and Blue states. It was made for the Internet and Fox television and talk radio.
And it was timed perfectly because of the firestorm that erupted two weeks ago when The New York Times broke the news that the Bush administration had authorized federal agents to monitor the telephone calls and e-
Source: Secrecy News, the newsletter written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
1-3-05
"All I can say is that Roazen is a menace whatever he writes," wrote an exasperated Anna Freud, referring to Paul Roazen, the historian of the psychoanalytic movement who died November 3.
In fact, Roazen was an exemplary scholar who opened up new avenues of inquiry regarding the founding and development of psychoanalysis. He posed questions that had never been asked before and, by dint of scholarly fact-checking, he corrected errors in the historical record, and in his ow
Source: NewScotsman
1-2-05
An expartriate Scottish historian provoked fury yesterday by calling for the land of his birth to be put into "liquidation" because it had become "the Belarus of the West". Professor Niall Ferguson said Scotland's glory days were long over, leaving it a "small, sparsely-populated appendage of England".
The Glasgow-born academic, who is now based at Harvard University in Massachusetts, said that Scotland's assets should be broken up, with the Scottish Pa
Source: Newsday
1-1-06
Alison Weir has been fascinated by the British monarchy since she was 14, when she read what she unabashedly calls a "pretty trashy" novel about Katherine of Aragon. "It was the sex and the executions that got me into it," she says cheerfully. "I know it's terrible to admit it!"
There's plenty of sex and several very gruesome executions in Weir's latest foray into royal history, "Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England&q
Source: Telegraph (UK)
12-31-05
In America, where fame and controversy are often sides of the same coin, Victor Davis Hanson is that near-oxymoron, a celebrity classicist. A scholar of great insight and originality, he has also cast himself as the modern Machiavelli, offering advice to his country's leaders that is drawn unabashedly from the ancient past.
Before September 11, 2001, Hanson launched charges against his fellow classicists for their failure "to explain the importance of Greek thought and values
Source: NYT
12-30-05
William W. Howells, a leading physical anthropologist who focused on the origins of humans and the evolution of races, died on Dec. 20 at his home in Kittery Point, Me. He was 97.
The death was announced by his family.
Professor Howells, emeritus professor of anthropology at Harvard, made perhaps his most important contribution to the field through his statistical analyses of the physical variations among today's humans. His conclusion, based on skull measurements, was
Source: William Grimes in the NYT
12-30-05
Rodney Stark comes out swinging right from the bell in ''The Victory of Reason,'' his fiercely polemical account of the rise of capitalism. Mr. Stark, the author of ''The Rise of Christianity'' and ''One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism,'' is sick and tired of reading that religion impeded scientific progress and stunted human freedom. To those who say that capitalism and democracy developed only after secular-minded thinkers turned the light of reason on the obscurantism of the D
Source: New Orleans Times-Picayune
12-28-05
... President Bush and some members of Congress are pushing the limits of disaster aid ... by talking of a major rebuilding effort across the Gulf Coast, inviting comparisons to the Marshall Plan, said Stephen Slivinski, budget analyst for the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank that pushes for restraint in spending.
"It creates the expectation that any future disasters are going to receive the same kind of treatment, and creates a dangerous precedent," he said. "
Source: Deutsche Welle
12-27-05
The German government responded critically to news that Susanne Osthoff, recently freed from hostage in Iraq, was planning to return to the country regardless of Berlin's warnings.
In her first public appearance since she was freed by her Iraqi kidnappers on Dec. 18, German archaeologist Susanne Osthoff said her kidnappers were not criminals. A picture has emerged of Osthoff in the German press as a dedicated humanitarian and historian who was well aware of the risks of life in Iraq
Source: Star Tribune
12-27-05
Lucy Simler an independent historian who helped launch the University of Minnesota's Center for Early Modern History and who wrote about colonial Pennsylvania, died in Edina on Dec. 20 of complications from a fall last spring.The St. Paul resident was 79.
"How extraordinary it was for her to carve out a career as a private scholar. She didn't have an academic appointment. She created her own intellectual agenda," said Ted Farmer, a professo
Source: Montreal Gazette
12-27-05
Selma Jeanne Cohen, a historian, editor and teacher who devoted her career to proclaiming dance an art worthy of the same scholarly respect traditionally awarded to painting, music and literature, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer's disease, said Leslie Steinau, her lawyer and a longtime friend.
Cohen waged a tireless campaign against scholars who maintained dance was inherently frivolous. Instead, she belie
Source: NYT
12-24-05
Charles F. Cummings, the official historian of Newark, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the city and its environs took in everything from the name of the first municipal commissioner of shade trees to the fact that a mayonnaise factory once graced the shores of the Passaic River, died in the city on Wednesday. He was 68 and made his home in Newark.
Mr. Cummings died at a Newark hospital after heart surgery, said James Osbourn, the principal librarian of the Newark Public Library and
Source: NYT
12-24-05
David Patterson, a scholar of Jewish life in Europe who established a center for Hebrew and Jewish studies at Oxford University to help revive a discipline that had been virtually destroyed during the Holocaust, died at a hospital in Oxford on Dec. 10. He was 83.
The cause was prostate cancer, according to Jackie Finlay, his personal assistant.
Dr. Patterson, an expert in the Hebrew literature of Europe, envisioned the center shortly after joining Oxford's faculty in 1
