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: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History
9-30-05
F. Ross Holland Jr., the dean of American lighthouse historians and the author of an insightful book on the Statue of Liberty's restoration project of the 1980s, died 16 September 2005 of Alzheimer's disease at his home in Mason, New Hampshire. He was 78. Holland, a historian and cultural resources manager for more than three decades with the National Park Service, wrote prolifically on lighthouses, their builders and keepers including, "America's Lighthouses: An Illustrated History" (
Source: Baltimore Sun
9-28-05
American University political historian Allan Lichtman announced his candidacy today for U.S. Senate, saying his upstart campaign for the Democratic nomination was a challenge to a tradition of Maryland Democrats anointing a front-runner in statewide races.
Speaking at his son's middle school in Bethesda, Lichtman compared himself to the late Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota political scientist who won a Senate seat in 1990 without ever holding elected office. And he challenged the
Source: Thomas Mallon, in the Atlantic Monthly
9-27-05
NoteIn his Atlantic article about Doris Kearns Goodwin's new Lincoln biography Mr. Mallon addresses the question of Ms. Goodwin's controversial use in the past of borrowed passages without attribution. He reports that she preferred not to discuss the subject and asked to go off the record when the subject came up. The following excerpt from Mr. Mallon's article focuses exclusively on her work on Lincoln.
Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's much anticipated book about Abra
Source: Newsletter of the American Revolution Round Table
9-27-05
Not content to tell us the story of his riveting book, The French War Against America, which details Paris's machinations to undermine American independence during and after the Revolution, Harlow Giles Unger held us spellbound with an in depth discussion of the psychological and intellectual history of France from its earliest days as a nation. The French of the eras of Clovis and Charlemagne became imbued with the idea that they were the divinely ordained first nation not only of Europe but of
Source: Press Release
9-26-05
A conference honoring Eric Foner will be held at Columbia University on October 14 and 15. The conference has been organized by some of his former students who are teaching at various institutions across the country and is a prelude to a feschrift to be published by Columbia University Press. CONTESTED DEMOCRACY: Freedom, Race and Power in American History: A Conference in honor of Eric Foner
Friday, OCTOBER 14th &
Saturday OCTOBER 15th
Sponsor
Source: The Australian
9-24-05
In 1926, 29 countries could be described as democracies. This number rose slowly to 36 in 1962, but just before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1988 only 66 out of 167 UN member states claimed to be democracies. By 2000, the figure had increased to 120 out of 192, the first time democracy had acquired majority status on a world scale. Yet for English historian Paul Ginsborg, "this enormously significant fact ... has to be inspected carefully".
Ginsborg is professor of conte
Source: Independent on Sunday (London)
9-25-05
A basketball-loving New York historian is set to inherit the mantle of Simon Wiesenthal, who died last week, as the world's leading Nazi-hunter.
Efraim Zuroff is putting cash bounties on the heads of fugitives accused of war crimes in an attempt to bring them rapidly to justice. The founder of the Jerusalem branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, and a close friend of the man after whom it was named, Mr Zuroff is the brains behind 'Operation Last Chance', a final attempt to flush out
Source: NYT
9-25-05
"THE history of the world is, sadly, not a pretty poem," the art historian E. H. Gombrich wrote in his first book, a history primer for children, published in German in 1936. "It offers little variety, and it is nearly always the unpleasant things that are repeated, over and over again."
That book, "A Little History of the World," was a critical and popular success, translated in its early years into five languages. But for decades, Gombrich, one of the
Source: Alexander H. Joffe, at frontpagemag.com
9-21-05
[Alexander H. Joffe is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
William Polk's recent installment of his series"What America Needs to Do to Achieve Its Foreign Policy Goals … Concerning Public Ignorance" over at History News Network is eye-opening, in the sense th
Source: Cavalier Daily
9-21-05
Terry Belanger, a history and engineering professor and honorary curator of the Special Collections Library, was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship yesterday.The award grants five-year fellowships to those who exhibit "exceptional merit and promise of continued and enhanced creative work" and includes a $500,000 stipend, according to the MacArthur Foundation.
Belanger's MacArthur Fellowship is the first to be awarded to a University Professor since 2002. He plans to use the mo
Source: Allan Lichtman Campaign Announcement
9-21-05
American University political history professor, Maryland columnist, CNN political analyst, and voting rights expert Allan Lichtman, is announcing his candidacy as a Democrat for the open U.S. Senate seat in Maryland. He is running to challenge the biggest, most intrusive, and least responsive government in our history. Allan believes that the Bush administration has turned America’s traditions upside down. Today there is too much government interfering in our private lives, as in the cases of t
Source: MacArthur Foundation
9-19-05
University of California - San Diego Associate Professor of History Emily Thompson was named one of the MacArthur Foundation's 2005 Fellows. Prof. Thompson, a groundbreaking historian in the field of aural, or sound, history, will recieve a half-million dollar "no-strings" grant over the next five years.[From the MacArthur Foundation Website:]
Emily Thompson is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work focuses on the often-overlooked subject of sound and
Source: Newsday
9-19-05
What's the deal with Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the Commerce Clause?
During Senate confirmation hearings last week, Schumer tried to pin down Judge John G. Roberts, President George W. Bush's nominee for chief justice of the United States, on this part of the Constitution. Many people probably asked: Why?
The Commerce Clause says that Congress shall "regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes." But w
Source: The Daily Yomiuri (Tokyo)
9-19-05
Shigeaki Mori, 68, a Hiroshima historian who has researched the fate of U.S. prisoners of war who died in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima 60 years ago and other atomic bomb victims, attended the 2005 National POW/MIA Recognition Day luncheon as guest speaker at the U.S. Air Force's Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni on Friday.
Mori, who was 8 when the atomic bomb was dropped, has researched atomic bomb victims for almost 30 years. He has helped add the names of six U.S. POWs who died
Source: NYT
9-18-05
Q. As a renowned scholar of African-American history, a field that some say you virtually invented, how do you think Hurricane Katrina has altered our view of race in this country? The tragedy is that Katrina changed our view at all.
We should have known the things that Katrina brought out.
Q. Like the fact that blacks in New Orleans live in the lowest and most flood-prone elevations, while whites occupy the higher and safer land?
Yes, but we don't have a
Source: Informed Comment, the blog of Juan Cole
9-16-05
I just haven't had time to watch the Hitchens/ Galloway debate, and won't have time to do it until this weekend. Kind readers are messaging me to say that they thought they heard my name come up. In response to Galloway's citation of my article critiquing Hitchens's defense of the ongoing Iraq war, I am told that Hitchens said words to the effect that I "claimed" to know Arabic and Persian but that I had never been in the region to his knowledge, and that I changed my mind every two se
Source: The Independent (London)
9-14-05
Richard Welbourn led one of the biggest departments of surgery in the UK and established a reputation internationally for endocrine surgery and postgraduate courses at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School of London University. He was the first President of the British Association of Endocrine Surgery and took a prominent role in the teaching of medical ethics, co- editing and writing two editions of The Dictionary of Medical Ethics (in 1977 and 1980). On his retirement, in 1983, 25 professors o
Source: The Australian
9-14-05
Sydney academic Andrew Fraser is to publish his contentious views on race and culture in a Victorian university law journal only weeks after his own university banned him from teaching.
Professor Fraser, of Macquarie University, said the acceptance of his 6800-word article by the peer-reviewed journal of Deakin University law school vindicated his stand.
The article, Rethinking the White Australia Policy, will appear later this month, and argues that the latest science
Source: The Independent (London)
9-15-05
Richard Gray was one of the earliest and most gifted pioneers of African history as a subject worthy of academic study, and one which should be pursued in the interests both of the emerging universities of colonial Africa and of an outside world which was beginning to foresee see the end of colonial rule in that continent. During his later career his interests became increasingly concentrated on the religious history of Africa and the contemporary problems of relations between church and state i
Source: Dateline Alabama
8-13-05
When Hurricane Katrina hit, Tulane University historian Douglas Brinkley reacted like a family man, getting himself, his wife and two young children out of their apartment overlooking the Mississippi River and safely on to Houston.
When he returned later to New Orleans to help with the rescue effort, Brinkley began thinking again like a historian.
"I was in downtown New Orleans, in a boat with a minister and a couple of friends, and when I saw the shameful inactivi
