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: Independent (London)
12-23-05
Gordon A. Craig was a rare teacher, scholar, and public intellectual who, through his spoken lectures and printed words, could reach many different audiences, including students, specialists, political leaders and policy makers, the news media, and a general reading public interested to know how history impacted their lives and their world. A prolific and insightful writer, he became internationally renowned as an historian of diplomacy and of modern Germany.
His career was spent at
Source: David Carr in the NYT
12-23-05
AT the crest of a hill in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn one day in early December, a gust of wind makes the just-below-freezing temperatures seem just above tolerable. A voice - three parts honey, two parts gravitas with a grain or two of gravel thrown in - rises to be heard above the wind. It is the voice of God, only friendlier.
"It was like the parting of the seas," said David McCullough, the historian and familiar narrator of television epics, as we looked out on Br
Source: Guardian
12-22-05
In 1945, the young warden of an adult education centre in Rugby was making a plan of the visible traces of medieval fields at Bittesby, in Leicestershire. He came to an area of irregular grass-covered mounds and hollows and, after initial puzzlement, realised he was looking at the remains of streets and houses from the village of Bittesby, abandoned for 450 years. This discovery, followed by the recognition of hundreds of other deserted villages, began the academic career of Maurice Beresford, w
Source: Australian
12-23-05
... The celebrated historian Niall Ferguson, a rigorous and imaginative thinker, wrote a crushing critique of Pinter's argument that such was the hegemony of the US in the 20th century that its evils -- from supporting right-wing dictatorships in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Greece, Haiti and more, to Vietnam and the current excursion in Iraq -- were barely recognised or discussed in the Western world.
Ferguson took issue with that and, expectedly, made a bravura argument against
Source: Donald Ritchie, in a email to HNN
12-22-05
In the spring of 2005, Charles Bertram, a photographer for the Lexington Herald-Leader, asked Kentucky’s “historian laureate,” Dr. Thomas D. Clark for a list of ten places in Kentucky he thought every Kentuckian should visit. Clark, a former professor of history at the University of Kentucky, promised to produce a list but soon afterwards was hospitalized and died on June 28, 2005, ten days before his 102nd birthday. His widow found the list on his desk. He had been struggling to reduce his
Source: Baltimore Sun
12-21-05
William R. Hutchison, 75, a leading scholar of American religious history, died Friday at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. The cause of death was stomach cancer, according to his daughter, Elizabeth.
At the time of his death, Dr. Hutchison was Charles Warren research professor of American religious history at Harvard Divinity School.
Dr. Hutchison was `'the dean of American religious historians," David Hollinger, chairman of the history department at the Un
Source: Lawrence Journal-World
12-20-05
retired Kansas University professor says the federal government has been poking into the mail he receives from abroad.
Grant Goodman on Monday showed the Journal-World a recent letter he had received from a friend in the Philippines; it apparently had been opened, then re-closed with green tape bearing the seal of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and a message that it had been opened “by Border Protection.”
“Very uneasy. And very surprised,” Goodman, 81, a KU p
Source: Wa Po
12-18-05
When he isn't fashioning gigantic biographies of American presidents, Edmund Morris has often written about music, including a brief but distinguished tenure as a reviewer for this newspaper. Morris has the ability to impart genuine aesthetic and technical information to his audience without devolving into jargon; he recognizes that while the effect music has on us may be mysterious, any description of its processes shouldn't be.
Moreover, as a historian, Morris knows how to set a
Source: NYT
12-18-05
Mary Aiken Littauer, whose love affair with horses began with a childhood pony, blossomed with her marriage to an officer in the cavalry of Czar Nicholas II, and flowered famously when she became a leading expert on horses of ancient times, died on Dec. 7 at her home in Syosset, N.Y. She was 93.
Mrs. Littauer's scholarly career did not begin until her mid-50's, when her husband's health would no longer permit him to maintain his standards of horsemanship. The standards were high ind
Source: New York Statesman
12-18-05
After being a fugitive for seven weeks, alleged New York Halloween sex attacker Peter Braunstein was captured in Memphis.
However, as police approached his makeshift campsite near the University of Memphis, Braunstein plunged a 3-inch knife into his neck and stabbed himself several times, police sources told the New York Daily News.
I am the man the world is looking for, Braunstein told police. My name is Peter Braunstein.
Braunstein allegedly bought a fire
Source: Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
12-16-05
If the usual surfeit of Christmas entertainment leaves you on the verge of a diabetic coma, Marx in Soho can provide a quick shock to the intellect.
The one-man play by historian Howard Zinn brings Karl Marx back from the dead, wandering into an audience and taking the opportunity to clear his name. Directed by Bob Buckley and starring Christopher Kendall, it's a rigorous, exciting evening more likely to radicalize liberals than to liberalize conservatives.
Kendall has
Source: Boston Globe
12-16-05
The Pilgrims, persecuted religious dissidents who founded a colony on a shoestring in what they expected to be Virginia, are a well-studied subject. Though there has been no reexamination of the colony's history by a major historian in recent years, that is about to change.
Prize-winning author Nathaniel Philbrick, who struck bestseller gold with his account of a 19th-century whaling expedition, is working on an account of the early phase of the Plymouth Colony, from the voyage of t
Source: Daily Telegraph (London)
12-16-05
JULIÁN MARÍAS, who died yesterday aged 91, was an historian of philosophy, a prolific writer and critic, and the foremost disciple of the Spanish literary theorist José Ortega y Gasset.
Marías was a familiar figure in America, holding a large number of professorships there until the 1970s, but was best-known in Spanish-speaking countries for his monumental History of Philosophy, published in 1941. It subsequently went through dozens of editions and was regarded by some as the best
Source: Raw Story website
12-15-05
Raw Story's John Byrne: Speaking to elementary school children Tuesday, Lynne Cheney compared this week's parliamentary elections in Iraq to America's own early struggle for democracy. "Two hundred and seventeen years ago, we held our first vote under our Constitution," she said. "We started then on the path the Iraqis are walking now." What do you make of that?
Boston University Professor Emeritus of Political Science Howard Zinn: [Laughs] It's sort of ridiculou
Source: Slate
12-14-05
I was delighted to read the review of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Fred Siegel, a historian I greatly admire. Yet I'm afraid that he has misapprehended my book as a brief on behalf of the modern Democratic Party. He bases his misreading not on the book itself but on an article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, which pointed out some of the similarities between the forgotten Whig Party and today
Source: Deutscher Prize website
The 2005 Deutscher Prize has been awarded to:
Revolution and Counterrevolution, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory by Kevin Murphy (published by Berghahn Books).
Every year, this prize is awarded for a book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition. The closing date for nominations is May 1st.
There is a modest prize of £250, the winning title is announced in the press, and the author is invited to de
Source: Seattle Times
12-15-05
At 90, Dr. John Hope Franklin has seen a lot of history, been part of some of it and chronicled more of it than almost anyone else. He's a hard worker who even in retirement is still turning out books.
His latest book, "Mirror to America," came out just last month. Part autobiography and part history, it tells the story of his remarkable family and of the 20th-century civil-rights movement. The book is full of victories and momentous change for the better, but it is also a
Source: New York Magazine
12-19-05
‘The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln,’ by Sean Wilentz. This barge of a book (992 pages) confirms Sean Wilentz as the Richard Hofstadter of our day—the supreme political historian. But where Hofstadter wrote history in dazzling generalities, Wilentz both expounds on massive themes and pillages the archives for little-known characters and forgotten movements. (Long live the Locofocos!) He tells a story that parallels George Packer’s book about Iraq—the sweaty, excruciating deli
Source: Peter Ryan in the Australian
12-15-05
AGHAST at their television screens as they watched Sydney's race riots, how many Australians cast their minds back 20 years to remember Geoffrey Blainey's thoughtful warning that such horrors might happen? Happen, that is, unless we reconsidered our program of almost indiscriminate immigration and the accompanying madness of multiculturalism.
I suppose very few viewers -- or newspaper readers, or radio listeners -- made the connection: if a week is a long time in politics, two decad
Source: Atlantic Monthly
11-29-05
What made you decide to write about Lincoln in the context of his cabinet? Was that your original concept for the book or did it change shape as you worked on it?
No, it definitely emerged as I went along. At first I really had no idea how to approach Lincoln other than knowing that I was going to live with him and learn about the Civil War and understand him. It was just kind of a leap of faith I took at the beginning that as I got into it I might be able to find my own angle into
