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: NEH website
11-9-05
President George W. Bush will award the 2005 National Humanities Medal on Thursday to eleven distinguished Americans and one scholarly research project for their contributions to the humanities. At a White House ceremony, the President will present the National Humanities Medal to Walter Berns, Matthew Bogdanos, Eva Brann, John Lewis Gaddis, Richard Gilder, Mary Ann Glendon, Leigh Keno, Leslie Keno, Alan Charles Kors, Lewis Lehrman, Judith Martin, and the Papers of George Washington Project at t
Source: Metro Times
11-9-05
Thomas J. Sugrue’s The Origins of the Urban Crisis should have been to the ’90s what Michael Harrington’s The Other America was to the ’60s — a book that galvanized the nation to see a problem and act. If it fell short of that mark, it hardly went unnoticed.
Subtitled Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, the University of Pennsylvania historian’s 1996 book has been lauded as a milestone in contemporary American history. It resists oversimplification, but its key points are clear:
Source: Frontpagemag.com
11-8-05
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, director emeritus of the classics program at California State University, Fresno, and currently a classicist and military historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of The Western Way of War, The Wars of the Ancient Greeks, The Soul of Battle, Carnage and Culture, and Ripples of Battle. His new book is A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War. The interview was conduc
Source: AP
11-9-05
Gordon A. Craig, one of the nation's most respected experts on modern German history, has died of heart failure. He was 91. Craig, a Stanford University professor and the prolific author of dozens of books, including the well-known "Germany" and "The Germans" died Oct. 30 at a Portola Valley nursing home, university officials said.Craig was "the most distinguished historian of modern Germany in this country and possibly one of the greatest in the wor
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandstorm
11-7-05
A journal called the Radical History Review, published by the Radical Historians' Organization, Inc. (!), has just published an
Source: AP
11-9-05
For the casual tourist or college student, the Great Hall in 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, 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 elected.
"You
Source: NYT
11-6-05
President Bush has announced that Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Muhammad Ali are among the recipients this year of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civil award. Mr. Bush will present the awards on Wednesday at the White House. The other recipients are Carol Burnett, Aretha Franklin and Andy Griffith, the entertainers; the historian Robert Conquest; Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, designers of software code; Paul Harvey, the radio personality; former
Source: Emory Wheel
11-4-05
A former Emory law professor accused of assaulting a staff member will resolve his three-year legal battle in the coming weeks, according to his attorneys.
David Garrow, who wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., was charged with simple battery in 2002, after then-Law School Senior Manager of Operations Gloria Mann filed criminal and civil charges against Garrow, saying he grabbed her wrists, pushed and verbally assaulted her.
Garrow went o
Source: Marc Abrahams in the Guardian
11-8-05
True, at its height, the British empire produced magnificent heaps of wealth and power. But according to the historian Jeffrey Auerbach, the empire also generated staggering amounts of boredom.
In a copiously documented report in the journal Common Knowledge, Auerbach writes: "Throughout the 19th century and into the 20th, British imperial administrators at all levels were bored by their experience travelling and working in the service of king or queen and country. Yet in the p
Source: Bill Eichenberger in the Columbus Dispatch
11-8-05
Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln reached bookstores only a few weeks ago, but author Doris Kearns Goodwin is already experiencing symptoms of withdrawal from her subject.
"I've been living with Mr. Lincoln for a decade and could easily have stayed with him for another 10 years without being bored or feeling I had him all figured out," she said in advance of her Columbus visit for a Thurber House event.
"Ida Tarbell (author of The Li
Source: Max Holland, in the Washington Spectator
11-1-05
Timothy Naftali's Response
Max Holland's Comment on Naftali's Response
Designating Norton as the publisher of the 9/11 Report was not the only plum handed out during Philip Zelikow's tenure as director. Zelikow engaged in some blatant cronyism when he arranged for a colleague from the University of Virginia, Tim Naftali, to write a history of U.S. counterterrorism policy from the John
Source: Independent (London)
11-7-05
David Reeder was a gifted teacher and one of the most influential historians of his generation. He was a key figure in the study of Urban History, during a period of intense inner-city redevelopment, and of Education History, at a time when ideas about schooling were undergoing re-examination. In both of these fields Leicester University led the way, and Reeder's contribution to the university's reputation was sustained over a long and varied career.
Reeder was born in Hull in 1931.
Source: Los Angeles Times
11-7-05
Gordon A. Craig, considered America's dean of German historians and a respected professor at Stanford University, has died. He was 91.
Craig, perhaps best known for his books "Germany" and "The Germans," died Oct. 30 of heart failure at the Sequoias, a nursing facility in Portola Valley, Calif., Stanford officials announced.
The prolific writer and educator was described as "the most distinguished historian of modern Germany in this country and
Source: The Independent (London)
11-7-05
David Reeder was a gifted teacher and one of the most influential historians of his generation. He was a key figure in the study of Urban History, during a period of intense inner-city redevelopment, and of Education History, at a time when ideas about schooling were undergoing re-examination. In both of these fields Leicester University led the way, and Reeder's contribution to the university's reputation was sustained over a long and varied career.
Reeder was born in Hull in 1931.
Source: Isi Liebler in the Jerusalem Post
11-1-05
Historically, self-hating Jews besmirching their kinsmen have ranged from apostates in the Middle Ages to communists in Stalinist Russia. Today their successors have assumed pivotal roles in the global campaign to delegitimize Israel.
The most recent chapter in the ongoing offensive is Norman Finkelstein's book Beyond Chutzpa, which endeavors to depict Israel as one of the most evil countries in the world. The author also defames Alan Dershowitz, author of the widely acclaimed The
Source: The Independent (London)
11-3-05
The historian of philosophy Raymond Klibansky would have celebrated his 100th birthday on 15 October. Although he was best known for his critical editions and scholarly interpretations of medieval and Renaissance thinkers, his expertise ranged from antiquity to the present and included British as well as continental philosophy.
His father, Hermann Klibansky, a German wine exporter of Lithuanian Jewish descent, moved the family to Paris a few years before Raymond's birth in 1905, but
Source: NYT
11-3-05
Michael V. Korda will step down at the end of the year as editor in chief of Simon & Schuster's trade books imprint, a post he has held since 1968, the company said yesterday. He will remain as editor in chief emeritus, editing the books of about a half dozen writers, including David McCullough, Larry McMurtry and Mary Higgins Clark.
Mr. Korda, 72, is working on a biography of Eisenhower and a history of the Battle of Britain. He and his wife, Margaret, are the co-authors of &qu
Source: Times Online (UK)
10-30-05
If Robert Conquest’s thought were not so challenging, it would be easy to dismiss him as a colossus from a past age. Born in 1917, he counted Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin among his friends, and won fame as a poet as well as a historian. He traversed the whole political spectrum, joining the Communist party in 1937 and, in the 1980s, writing speeches for Margaret Thatcher. As an intelligence officer during the war he was posted to Bulgaria, and it was watching the post-war Soviet takeover ther
Source: WP
11-3-05
Tell John Hope Franklin that he's the Rosa Parks of historians and he lets out a long, astonished laugh.
"Please," he says.
Okay, we won't push him on that right now. But the comparison is not as silly as he makes it sound.Franklin is in Washington this week to talk about his newly published autobiography, "Mirror to America." Now an emeritus professor at Duke, he's a handsome, white-haired man in a gray suit whose upright bearin
Source: BU Today
11-2-05
Scooter Libby. Monica Lewinsky. John Poindexter. Sherman Adams. What do they have in common? Each was a troubling footnote in second-term presidencies — those of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Dwight Eisenhower, respectively — and they are the kind of historic dots that Julian Zelizer loves to connect for reporters, who increasingly regard him as a go-to expert in American political history, quoting him often since last year’s presidential campaign.
Now the CAS and
