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.
Martin Kramer, at his blog (7-14-05):
[Mr. Kramer, author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.]
These last few weeks, Professor Juan Cole, blogger extraordinaire, has been even more over-the-top than usual, and I've been busy calling him on
Martin Kramer, at his blog (7-9-05):For a trained historian, even in Middle Eastern studies, Juan Cole is scandalously incompetent when it comes to cause and effect. Here's his latest gaffe, made in the context of the London bombings: According to the September 11 Commission report, a
Alister McMillan in the South China Morning Post (7-1-05): Mobutu Sese Seko became part of the controversial new biography of Mao Zedong during a manicure in Hong Kong. Wild Swans author Jung Chang and her husband, historian Jon Halliday, were reading this newspaper in 1994 when they discovered that the former leader of Zaire - now the Democratic Republic of Congo - was staying in the same hotel, The Regent.
Halliday was keen to interview
John B. Judis, in the New Republic (6-24-05):
I first met Jimmy Weinstein, who died last week at age 78, in the spring of 1969, when my little world--and that of the New Left--were both coming apart. I had just learned that I would not be welcome back at graduate school. I dreamed of becoming a full-time activist, but Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), to which I belonged, had become infatuated with i
Juan Cole, at his blog (6-22-05):I don't usually bother to reply at any length to my Neocon critics. Mostly this is because they are simply insincere, and say what they say maliciously and in knowledge of its falsehood. In some instances they have quite unethically subjected their opponents to harassment of a sort that is illegal in some states. They are purely political beasts, for
Eugene
Girin, in Frontpagemag.com (6-14-05)[Mr. Girin will be attending CUNY Baruch College as a junior this fall. He
has been published by Israel National News, VDARE.com, Think-Israel, and other
websites and magazines in the United States, Israel, and Russia.] The current War on Terror “has its roots in our refusal to be an equal
part of the world community” and results
"Cicero" at the website of Buzzflash (6-14-05):David McCullough's best-selling books on American history have been praised for their readability and criticized for their superficiality.But no one has detected a political agenda behind McCullough's output. McCullough's books projects a patriotic warmth about his American heroes -- nothing too controversial.And until now, McC
Martin
Kramer, from the Sandbox (6-14-05)[Mr. Kramer is a senior associate (and past director) of the Moshe Dayan Center
for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University. He is also the
Wexler-Fromer Fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy..]Professor Juan Cole, the blogging sensation, is at it again,
Michael
Rubin, in the Frontpagemag.com (6-14-05)[Mr. Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is editor
of the Middle East Quarterly.]University continues to consider hiring embattled Columbia University professor
Rashid Khalidi for its newly-endowed Robert Niehaus chair in Contemporary Middle
East Studies. Khalidi, a specialist on Palestinian politics a
Barry
Henaut, from the Toronto Star (6-11-05)[Mr. Henaut holds a Ph.D. in Early Christian Literature from the University
of Toronto.]Tom Harpur, in his book The Pagan Christ, advances the thesis that Jesus of
Nazareth may not have been an actual historical person and that th
Susan Larson, in the Times-Picayune (6-7-05)...He[Brinkley] describes the media circus that was part of the origin for
his most recent book, "The Boys of Pointe du Hoc: Ronald Reagan, D-Day,
and the U.S. Army 2nd Ranger Battalion.""I was in Normandy last June, working with CNN on their coverage of the
D-Day anniversary," he said. "I was in a li
Steven Plaut, in Frontpagemag.com (6-7-05) Lisa Hajjar has made an entire academic career out of bashing the United States
and Israel for their supposed use of “torture” against Arabs. She
spouts off these baseless accusations from her academic home at the University
of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB), where she teaches in its “Law and
Society” program. In fact she has no credentials a
Rachel Donadio, in the NYT Book Review (5-29-05): [Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.]WHEN it came out in 1967, ''The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,'' by Harold Cruse, crystallized a moment. The moment passed, but Cruse, a black cultural nationalist, was not just a footnote to history.
''The Crisis'' was at once an anti-integrationist manifesto and a critical history of 20th-century African-American culture and politics, and it arrived
An interview with Donald Kagan, on the website of the National Endowment for the Humanities:
[NEH Chairman Bruce Cole spoke recently with this year's Jefferson Lecturer, Donald Kagan, about the teaching of history. Kagan has taught at Yale for thirty-six years and is the author of eleven books, among them his four-volume magisterial work, The Peloponnesian War.]
Bruce Cole: How did you get to be an histori
Hillel
Italie, in the Indianapolis Star (5-29-05):As his latest book, "1776," arrives in stores, he's been thinking
a lot about the birth of the country and what people know about it. The kids
at Josiah Haynes seem pretty on top of their studies, even though not all know
why 1776 is important. But McCullough worries that the United States is in a
deep and da
John Ehrman, author of The Eighties, in a comment posted on CNET, the conservative list run by Richard Jensen (5-27-05): How did I come to write The Eighties as I did? It's a little complicated, but probably no more so than for any other writer.
My main purpose was to answer a question that had nagged at me for some time. When I started on the project, in 1995, the 1980s had the reputation of being the "decade of greed," when the few did well and the
Nigel Farndale, in the Sunday Telegraph (5-22-05): Among the Chinese artefacts in Jung Chang's Notting Hill drawing-room there is a large terracotta horse and a 19th-century painting of "big noses" - as she was taught to call foreigners - kow-towing to an emperor in the Forbidden City. "They are to remind me of what he destroyed," the 53-year-old author says in her slightly guttural, Chinese-accented English.
The "he" referred to is M
Jon Meacham, in Newsweek (5-22-05):...The only sound in the room where McCullough works—a tiny book-lined shingled building, just 8 feet by 12—comes from the clack-clack-clack of a 1940 Royal manual typewriter, bought secondhand in White Plains, New York, in 1965. The setting is snug, almost claustrophobic, but it is here, in his backyard office on Martha's Vineyard, that McCullough's imagina
Robert Ito, in the Village Voice (5-19-05):
Iris Chang first heard stories about the Nanking massacre as a young girl. During World War II, her parents told her, Japanese soldiers had slaughtered babies with bayonets. The Yangtze River had run red with blood; thousands of Chinese civilians had been tortured and raped. They were grotesque tales, almost fantastical in their horror. How could such things happen, she
Geoff Mulvihill, in the Wa Po (5-16-05):Jordan Ingram always thought his history professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University was a little quirky. Jacques Pluss certainly had an unusual style, Ingram recalled. But Ingram, who is black, never thought his professor was a racist until after Pluss was fired.
Pluss said he was dismissed in M
