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.
Thomas Bartlett
and Scott Smallwood, cin the Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscribrs only) (12-13-04):Editor's Note: In their article about plagiarism, Bartlett and Smallwood highlight four cases they came across in an investigation of "plagiarists you've never heard of." Two of the four involve historians: Benson Tong and Donald Cuccioletta. The others concern a geographer and a political scientist.
Editor's Note: Click here to read Juan Cole's response to this article.Jonathan Calt Harris, at frontpagemag.com (12-7-04):
[Jonathan Calt Harris, a writer for Campus Watch, lives in Illinois.]Professional organizations choose their leaders as much for their symbolism as for organizational ability. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is the foremost professional organization representing academics working
Juan Cole, at his blog (12-8-04):Yes, I'm aware that Daniel Pipes of the so-called Middle East Forum sent some puppy out to slime me over at David Horowitz's Frontpagerag. So this is the way it goes with the Likudniks. First they haras
Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe, 12/7/04
Consider better yet, sing"My country, 'tis of thee," and note two phrases in the first stanza:"sweet land of liberty" and"let freedom ring."
So familiar, but also, in the conjunction of"liberty" and"freedom," an example of what historian David Hackett Fischer identifies as the uniquely American pairing of those two political ideas.
For, Fischer writes, most Americans do not think of"liberty" and"freedom" as a
John Marshall, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (12-7-04):
All seems forgiven, or mostly forgotten, for Joseph J. Ellis.Three years after he was ensnared in a national embarrassment of his own making, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian is back near the top of the best-seller lists with his latest biographical look at one of the Founding Fathers. Ellis is also the beneficiary of a 20-city national book to
Johanna Neuman, in the LAT (12-4-04): President Bush plans to name a new chairman and vice chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission as early as Monday, a move that could end the tumultuous reign of its current chairwoman, Mary Frances Berry.
Berry, who has been a member of the commission for 24 of its 47 years, has been a bane to presidents who tried to fire her or dodge her. She has been targeted in repeated Government Accountability Office reports alleging mi
Scott Sherman, in the Nation (Dec. 6, 2004):Last year Kenneth Maxwell, a soft-spoken 63-year-old historian of Latin America, published a review of Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability in the November/December 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs, the influential journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. As The Nation reported in June [see Sherman, "The Ma
Juan Cole, at his blog (12-2-04):Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer <http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/12/02/c1.cr.cardsuit.1202.html> settled a libel suit out of court with University of Oregon instructor Douglas Card. They had accused Card of bei
Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (12-1-04):Others may have sympathized on learning that Hamid Dabashi, a professor of
Middle East studies at Columbia University, felt threatened by a graduate student
at his own university, but not me.The incident began late on Sept. 27, 2004, when Victor Luria, a Ph.D. candidate
in genetics and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, wrote Dabashi
an e-mail taking strong exception to what Dabashi had written
Ariel Natan Pasko, at enterstageright.com (11-29-04):
Every once in a while, I read an op-ed piece and say to myself, "Wait a second, that's not true." I just read such a piece in the Jerusalem Post; "Neither rejoice, nor lament" by Michael B. Oren, the best-selling author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, (OUP 2002). A longer versio
Piper Fogg and Robin Wilson, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (11-29-04):
In 1970 The Chronicle published an article on the status of women in higher education. Female scholars, it reported, were "discontent," and were challenging both overt and subtle discrimination. Their salaries were lower than men's, and they were concentrated mostly in smaller colleges.
But there were bright spots, and The Chronicle also highlighted women who were succeeding in acade
C.K.Wolfson, in the Vineyard Gazette:Two days before people crowded into the Pease House in Edgartown to hear historian Mary Beth Norton discuss In The Devil's Snare (Alfred A. Knopf, $30), her new, much acclaimed book about the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials, the author relaxed with a visitor in her contemporary West Tisbury home.A distant relative of convicted witch Mistress Mary Bradbury, the Co
Martin
Kramer, at his blog (Nov. 21, 2004):This evening, the participants in the annual Middle East Studies Association
(MESA) conference in San Francisco will assemble in plenary session, to hear
an address by MESA's president, Laurie Brand. The title: "Scholarship in
the Shadow of Empire." (Presumably that's the American empire, not the
Abbasid.) When Brand delivers her a
Jonathan Pitts, The Baltimore Sun, 17 Nov. 2004
Chancellorsville, VA - It's a brisk fall morning, the sun battling to break its way through leaden clouds, as the man in the wraparound shades pops out of a thicket of trees. Thirty-five people trail in James McPherson's wake as he ambles down a brush-covered hillside toward a clearing below, but he casts nary a glance to the rear. The general's job is to keep his eyes on the battlefield, you see, to keep looking ahead. The troo
Allan Laing, The Herald (Glasgow), 16 Nov. 2004
Perched in splendid isolation on a windswept coast, the Great House of Sker is a residence fit for the History Man.
Built by Welsh monks and dating back to the twelfth century, it was a dilapidated ruin until a few years ago. Now, restored at last to its former glory, it is the place which Niall Ferguson, the Scottish historian, and his family call home.
The grade-one listed building near Porthcawl, Gl
Jen Stone, in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle (Nov. 14, 200):Jonathan Sarna, a history professor at Brandeis University, took it upon himself
to create an in-depth look at American Jewish history and published it in book
form just in time for the 350th anniversary of American Judaism. "There actually hasn't been a comprehensive history written on Judaism
Steve Clemons, at his blog (Nov. 11, 2004):
I HAVE JUST BEEN GUT-PUNCHED BY THE NEWS that a dear friend and intellectual soul mate over the last several years, Iris Chang, was found dead in her car near Santa Clara, California.
Iris's book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, had immeasurable impact on a collective historical amnesia problem not only in Japan, but also i
John Crace, The Guardian (London), 09 Nov. 2004
David Starkey is not your average history don. He's loud and opinionated and, to compound those crimes, he's a TV face and very, very rich. It's an explosive mixture that has had erstwhile colleagues and media pundits alike queuing round the block to stab him in the front. And right now Starkey may well have given them the perfect ammo to plunge the blade in still deeper.
For his latest TV series, Monarchy, Starkey
Chris Rose, Times-Picayune (New Orleans), 02 Nov. 2004
As the former rumpled hipster protégé to heavyweight historian Stephen Ambrose, Doug Brinkley has become the go-to pundit for all matters of instant history. Elections, celebrity deaths, literary scandals -- you name it, he's got the lowdown, get him on the evening news.
The director of UNO's Eisenhower Center for American Studies, Brinkley is often in the line of fire for counter-pundits -- perhaps because h
Hywel Williams, The Guardian (London), 03 Nov. 2004
The history of England is, alas, also the story of her monarchy. Out of this equation have grown some of the most powerful English myths - those of national Blitz-like solidarity, of smoothly purposeful institutional evolution, and cheerfully harmonious relationships between the classes. This being so, monarchy is a good subject for a historian who asks the central question: how did Alfred's successors manage to get away wit
