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: Providence Journal
12-13-05
Childhood lead poisoning was a problem of slum dwellings that could not be solved until there was a way to "get rid of our slums and educate the relatively ineducable parent," according to a document written by an official of the Lead Industries Association.
The document, a letter written in the 1950s by the director of the association's health and safety department, was one of a half-dozen documents presented by the state against NL Industries, Atlantic Richfield and Mill
Source: Guardian
12-14-05
The sociologist and sociological historian Professor Joe Banks, who has died age 85, was the leading authority of his generation on the Victorian family and its rapid reduction in size. He transformed our understanding of a problem that had fascinated and mystified social scientists for decades.
The Banks thesis focused to great effect on the fall in fertility among the Victorian middle classes, who were among the leaders of this domestic revolution in Britain between broadly 1870 a
Source: Haaretz
12-13-05
An Austrian court will begin the trial of British historian David Irving in February on charges of denying the Holocaust, a court spokesman said on Tuesday.
Irving was arrested in the southern province of Styria last month under a warrant issued in 1989 and has since been remanded in custody and charged with denying the Holocaust, a crime in Austria which carries a sentence of one to 10 years in prison."Irving's trial will take place on Feb. 20 and 21
Source: Fred Siegel in Slate
12-12-05
The Democratic Party and the endeavor of writing American history have a problem in common. Until the 1960s, both enjoyed the coherence of a shared narrative in which American politics and history could be described as a struggle by the great mass of virtuous Americans—"the people"—against privileged monopolists and plutocrats. Just before the 1948 presidential election, Harry "Give 'em Hell" Truman unloaded with a standard piece of populist rhetoric. "The Wall Street re
Source: Sun-Sentinel
12-11-05
For the casual tourist or college student, the Great Hall in Manhattan's Cooper Union might seem little more than an ornate auditorium, with its oil paintings, white columns and bright wooden stage.
But for Doris Kearns Goodwin, among others, the Great Hall is a landmark graced by history: Abraham Lincoln was here. He stood on that stage and spoke in early 1860, an address that established him as a national candidate, not just an Illinois lawyer and orator, and helped get him electe
Source: Neil Cameron in the Gazette (Montreal)
12-10-05
[Neil Cameron is a Montreal historian.]
Winston Churchill's pro-digious life found a prodigious biographer in Sir Martin Gilbert. Gilbert has published 75 books, and while many have been on other topics, he has made Churchill his lifelong preoccupation. His huge six-volume life was not only the largest work on any single political figure of the 20th century, but effectively a history of British and world politics centred on the life of the century's most remarkable man.
Source: Australian
12-7-05
TASMANIAN academic Michael Connor has called on the High Court to correct what he says are mistakes in its Mabo native title decision that tainted the foundations of Australia.
Dr Connor yesterday accused the court of wrongly accepting that Britain settled Australia in the belief that it was an empty land -- or terra nullius.
While the historian accepted that Aborigines had gradually been dispossessed, he said the foundation of Australia had not been based on the concept that Aborigines"we
Source: Australian
12-8-05
HISTORIAN Keith Windschuttle was wearing his publisher's hat this week, launching Michael Connor's book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, in Sydney. The event was attended by like-minded conservatives, including retired Court of Appeal judge Roddy Meagher, Leonie Kramer, David Flint, the NSW Liberal Party's David Clarke, Janet Albrechtsen and Christopher Pearson. Windschuttle will now settle down to write the second volume of his opus, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. But finding a market f
Source: Seth Sandronsky Interview with David Roediger at politicalaffairs.net
12-7-05
David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a scholar of critical whiteness studies, delivered a talk titled "The Dilemmas of Popular Front Antiracism: Looking at The House I Live In" on November 17 at the Marxist School of Sacramento. After screening this WW II film that stars Frank Sinatra, Roediger discussed what it tells us about the limits of anti-racisms that imagine we can subordinate justice to unity. He connected the film to the
Source: Newsweek
12-12-05
Shortly after the start of President George W. Bush's second term, a high-level "deputies" meeting was called at the White House. Issue one on the agenda was how to improve the administration's message in the face of allegations that the U.S. government condoned torture. Philip Zelikow, the powerful counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, spoke up first. He argued firmly that the problem was not how the policy of interrogation and detention was presented to the world; it was
Source: Boston Globe
12-9-05
Several boldface names showed up the other night to fete Bill Fowler , who's leaving the Massachusetts Historical Society after eight years as director. Among those gathering at Doyle's in JP were Henry Lee of the Friends of the Boston Public Garden, longtime Republican operative John Sears , former state Senator Bill Saltonstall , and former senate president Billy Bulger , who cracked wise for 15 funny minutes. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough and his wife, Rosalee , hosted. (M
Source: Reuters
12-8-05
Twenty-five years after John Lennon was murdered, a court battle to release the last 10 pages of secret FBI files on the former Beatle still rages on, with no end in sight.
The FBI assembled about 300 pages of files on the singer-turned-activist in 1971 and 1972 as part of President Richard Nixon's effort to deport and silence Lennon as a critic of the Vietnam War, according to historian Jon Wiener, who has led the court battle to release the files.
"After years of
Source: WSJ
12-5-05
... a major public, and publishers', row is raging in Europe -- the Canfora affair. A "distinguished" professor of classical philology at Bari University, Luciano Canfora, has produced a book in something like the worst of the neo-pro-Stalinist vein. "La Democrazia: Storia Di Un'Ideologia" is part of the series "The Making of Europe," put out by publishers in five countries under the direction of French Medievalist historian Jacques LeGoff. It somehow sneaked throug
Source: Press Release -- Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA)
11-21-05
The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) awarded its 2005 academic freedom prize to the Workshop for Armenian-Turkish Scholarship for its pioneering and successful efforts to address controversial issues raised by the destruction of the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire during World War One.
MESA made the award on Sunday evening, November 20, at an awards ceremony during its 40th annual meeting, held in Washington, D.C. The group cited the work of Professo
Source: ft.com
12-7-05
MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, which for most of its 96 years was not acknowledged as existing, is to be the subject of an official history. Professor Keith Jeffrey, of Queen's University Belfast, will write the history, to be published to mark MI6's centenary in 2009.
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said it was "another progressive move by SIS", which came in from the cold in only 1994 when the government acknowledged its existence.
But any expectat
Source: Christian Science Monitor
12-7-05
Normalcy: It's a wallflower during the ball, but it almost always gets the last waltz.
Recent proof of this universal truth is reflected in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to British playwright Harold Pinter. The master of menacing drama is revealed to be a fan of normalcy, of a most charming kind.
And therein lies a profound contradiction.
First, the work. Domination and submission are Mr. Pinter's themes. As The New York Times puts it, by d
Source: AP
12-6-05
Harry W. Lawton, a journalist and author whose account of the 1909 manhunt for an American Indian fugitive inspired the movie "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here," has died. He was 77.Lawton's 1960 book "Willie Boy: A Desert Manhunt" chronicled the hunt for a 28-year-old Paiute-Chemehuevi Indian who had shot and killed his girlfriend's father because he had forbidden the distant cousins from marrying.
Willie Boy and the 16-year-old girl, Carlota Bo
Source: Australian
12-6-05
Retiring University of Sydney professor Garry Trompf was a rare scholar of religion and politics, writes Bernard Lane
'I MUST tell you, I was a bit of a loner and I still am." Garry Trompf says this matter of factly, as he reflects on an unusual academic career.
He chased grand ideas down the halls of European history.
In Melanesia, he went from village to village, charting tradition. This month he retires as Australia's only -- perhaps its last? -- pr
Source: Medford News
12-6-05
Oregon State University historian Maureen Healy has learned from the American Historical Association that her book, "Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire," has won this year's Herbert Baxter Adams Prize to be awarded at the society's annual meeting in January of 2006.
The Adams Prize is the top prize that the association bestows in European history. Healy is the first member of the OSU History Department faculty ever to have received this award, which is given annual
Source: scoop.co.nz
12-6-05
If Michael Ignatieff is anything, it's connected, and I do not mean just to the relatively small establishment of Canada, I mean connected to the shadowy godfathers of world empire. Ignatieff has a rich career in America where truly loyal service, whether by natural or adopted sons, is always handsomely rewarded.
Another Canadian, David Frum, made it all the way to the White House with his custom-tailored scribbling. So too such a genuinely dangerous American as Pat Buchanan. How d
