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: Steven Plaut at frontpagemag.com
10-24-05
Canada has been keeping up with the United States in producing considerable numbers of flaky academic extremists. But it is doubtful that any are as bizarre as David F. Noble.*
Noble teaches at York University in Toronto, Canada’s third-largest school. Originally a graduate from the University of Florida, Noble is today a full, tenured professor of “social and political thought” in the Faculty of Arts at York. Interestingly, he is the ONLY professor in that department. Evidently
Source: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH(LONDON)
10-22-05
Roger Freeman, who has died aged 77, became one of the world's foremost military aviation historians alongside making his living as a farmer; he specialised in the history of the USAAF Eighth Air Force, the largest air striking force ever committed to battle.
Freeman, who grew up on a farm in East Anglia, had a boyhood obsession with aircraft which developed into a historical interest in the airmen and operations of the Eighth Air Force, a force with some 3,500 bombers and almost 1,
Source: The Gazette (Montreal)
10-23-05
Aline Gubbay, the historian, architectural photographer, author and social worker who chronicled the social and architectural history of Westmount and Montreal in four books, died in her apartment of pancreatic cancer Friday.
She was 85.
...
In the preface to Gubbay's last book, A View of Their Own, The Story of Westmount, the city's former Mayor Peter Trent described her writing as "a delicate work of love" that "deftly limns the city's gent
Source: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (LONDON)
10-24-05
Ronald Pearsall, who has died aged 77, was a literary jack-of-all-trades, writing on matters as diverse as antique dolls and the history of monarchy as well as publishing children's books, thrillers and even pornography; he was best known, however, as a historian of Victorian sub-culture.
In his book The Worm in the Bud (1969, the title a quotation from Twelfth Night: "But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, Feed on her damask cheek") Pearsall investigated the often s
Source: Paul Johnson in the NYT Book Review
10-23-05
WHY should a distinguished classical scholar like Victor Davis Hanson provide us with yet another book about the Peloponnesian War? He is in no doubt: he is writing a tract for the times. "Perhaps never," he insists, "has the Peloponnesian War been more relevant to Americans than to us of the present age."
This Greek civil war, between Athens and her allies and Sparta and her allies, lasted 27 years, from 431 to 404 B.C., and ended with the capitulation of Athen
Source: Randy Boswell in canwest.com
10-20-05
Britain's leading public historian, flush with a record-setting $6-million advance from the BBC for his latest series of books and companion TV specials, has plucked a little-known episode from Canadian history to anchor an epic -- and controversial -- narrative about Loyalist slaves who fled north to escape the American Revolution.
Simon Schama's Rough Crossings, now on sale in Britain and to be published in North America next spring, aims to demolish the "myth" that the
Source: Network of Concerned Historians
10-20-05
The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN reported yesterday that Grand Ayatollah Yasub al-Din Rastgari (born [1927]), a leading Shi'a religious leader and scholar, is detained for publishing a book on Islamic history which is allegedly critical of the policies of some historic characters and "denigrates the sanctity" of some Wahhabi sect personalities.PEN first learned of this case in June 2005, and exact details remain difficult to confirm. Int
Source: Boston Globe
10-21-05
Doris Kearns Goodwin has a fan in Steven Spielberg. Talking in yesterday's USA Today about her new book, "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," the historian revealed that the "Schindler's List" director has already optioned her book, and Liam Neeson will likely star. Described by a reviewer once as "the sequoia of sex," the Irish actor seems an odd choice to play Honest Abe. Or is he? Goodwin swears the 16th president had a sexy side. Gazing at
Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
10-20-05
Rodney Loehr, a retired University of Minnesota history professor and a former Army historian who attended the Yalta Conference in 1945 and a post-World War II clandestine investigator, died of natural causes Saturday in Bloomington.
He was 97.
About 1946 and '47 he worked for an organization that was a predecessor of the CIA, said Raymond Ploetz of Maple Grove, a retired colonel in the Army Reserve.
"His cover story was that he was an interrogator for
Source: NYT Book Review
10-16-05
Among the leading British historians, few have suffered as steep a decline in public estimation as J. Anthony Froude. With Gibbon and Hume, Froude played a key role in the advance of religious doubt; with Macaulay, he shaped Britain's view of itself as a nation whose greatness was intimately linked to the liberty of its political institutions. Even those who found him partisan and factually careless conceded his literary merit; in Lytton Strachey's words, he gave to historical events the "t
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
10-20-05
A former professor at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville will receive $215,000 from the institution in return for dropping a discrimination lawsuit that she originally filed in 2000.
Linda S. Schilcher, who was an untenured professor of history in the Middle East-studies program until the university dismissed her, in 1999, alleged in the lawsuit that she had been fired because she is not Arab and because she spoke out about problems within the program.
Charles
Source: The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon)
10-19-05
Alvin M. Josephy Jr. was born in New York and died Sunday in Greenwich, Conn., but he always considered Oregon his home.
Josephy titled his 2000 memoir "A Walk Toward Oregon." It was the last book the noted historian and advocate for Native American rights published before his death at age 90, although "Lewis and Clark Through Indian Eyes," an anthology he edited, is scheduled for publication next year.
Josephy owned a ranch in Joseph at the foot of
Source: The Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand)
10-19-05
The Holocaust has always held a fascination for Simone Gigliotti.
While growing up in Australia, she heard stories from her grandparents who fled Mussolini's fascist dictatorship in Italy in the early 1920s.
Studying history at Melbourne University, her interest in humanitarian issues encouraged her to delve into what happened during the Holocaust and why.
Now a history lecturer at Victoria University, Dr Gigliotti researches and teaches about Hitler's Fina
Source: Boston Globe
10-20-05
'Politics ain't beanbag" was the fictional Mr. Dooley's cryptic aphorism, meaning that politics is rarely played by Marquis of Queensberry rules. And labor politics can be especially sharp-elbowed; witness a campaign being launched by the striking Northwest Airlines mechanics' union to harass and discredit the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Northwest board member Doris Kearns Goodwin.
The Aircraft Mechanics Fraternal Association has been striking Northwest since August, w
Source: Boston Globe
10-18-05
Historian Alvin M. Josephy Jr. who wrote or edited more than a dozen books about the struggles of American Indian tribes, died Sunday at his home, his daughter said. He was 90.
Josephy, the founding chairman for the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, wrote books including "The Patriot Chiefs" and "Now That the Buffalo's Gone." He also edited the historical anthology "Red Power" a noted account of the campaign for Indian rights.
Source: Ottawa Citizen
10-15-05
It's probably not enough to zoom it to the top of the bestseller lists when it goes on sale today, but a new book chronicling the birth and development of the Order of Canada has one thing no other publication in Canadian history has had: A personal plug from the Queen.
Ottawa author Christopher McCreery, a historian who specializes in the study of Canada's constitutional monarchy, secured the royal nod of approval earlier this year and, yesterday in London, presented Buckingham Pal
10-18-05
By Anne KornhauserMs. Kornhauser is Lecturer in History at Princeton University. He has been president of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. He has won the Bancroft Prize and been a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received a Guggenheim and an NEH fellowship. He has been named Scholar of the Year, and has collected a Great Teacher Award from Columbia University alumni, among many, many other accolades. So what is left for Er
Source: Boston Globe
10-18-05
Maury Austin Bromsen, a historian, leading bibliographer, and antiquarian bookseller whose passion was acquiring materials relating to colonial Spanish America from the time of Columbus to the death of Simon Bolivar in 1830, died in his sleep Oct. 11 at his Back Bay residence. He was 86.
Mr. Bromsen amassed the "finest collection of manuscript and iconographic items" in the United States related to Bolivar, a leader in the struggle for South American independence, said Nor
Source: Guardian
10-18-05
"The way history is currently taught in schools jumping from Hitler to the Henrys," says British historian Simon Schama, "is like a nightmare vision of Star Wars, where you have episode four before you have episode one. The sense of going on a journey, of chronology and continuity, is incredibly important to the imagination."It was a terrible, tortured decision for me whether to read English or history. I should have gone to Harvard or som
Source: The Independent (London)
10-17-05
In early middle age (his forties), and after a variety of occupations, ranging from cinema manager through insurance salesman to store detective, the writer Ronald Pearsall stumbled across a largely unexploited mine of social history and cleverly proceeded to work it to his advantage virtually for the rest of his life.
Until the 1960s, quaking holidaymakers had had to smuggle across the Channel such books as Lady Chatterley's Lover, Terry Southern's Candy, Nabokov's Lolita and most
