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.
Daniel B. Wood, in th LAT (Oct. 27, 2004):A five-minute conversation with California historian Kevin Starr is likely
to include references to ancient Egypt, baseball, jazz, cuisine - and, of course,
America's end-of-the-rainbow state, which he now sees as a lab experiment in
"global ecumenical civilization." Philosopher, political scientist, literature professor, theologian - and author
of a six-volume series entitled "Americans and the Ca
John Laughland, in the
American Conservative (June 30, 2003):On the antiwar Right, it has been customary to attack the warmongering neoconservative
clique for its Trotskyite origins. Certainly, the founding father of neoconservatism,
Irving Kristol, wrote in 1983 that he was “proud” to have been a member
of the Fourth International in 1940. Other future leading lights of the neocon
movement were als
Hamish Macdonnell, The Scotsman, 20 Oct. 2004
A motion condemning the controversial historian David Starkey for his"ludicrous and misjudged" comments about Scotland has been tabled in the Scottish Parliament.
Richard Lochhead, an SNP MSP, tabled the motion after learning that Dr Starkey had dismissed Scotland as unimportant historically.
The well-known television historian had said:"Scotland matters for a single reason, which is its involvement with England from the 17th
Unsigned, The Guardian (London), 19 Oct. 2004"(Some) voters . . . may have been surprised by the person they saw in the three televised (presidential) debates. Knowledgeable, pragmatic, with an agile, focused mind - Mr Kerry was the same man in all three appearances.
"Arthur Schlesinger Jr, the presidential historian, was asked recently . . . whether he saw any comparisons between Mr Kerry and John Kennedy, in whose administration Mr Schlesinger served . . . He said he found the t
Tim Goodman, in the San Francisco Chronicle (Oct. 13, 2004):Last month, Daniel Flynn, a conservative pundit, published "Intellectual Morons," a 304-page book that rips Zinn for "America bashing" and biased writing. The tome also criticizes Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and other intellectuals who've been critical of the United States, but it singles out Zinn for special scrutiny because of Zinn's success with "A People's History of the United States.""A People's History" has sold more than 1 million copies since its release in 1980, making it one of the most popular works on American history. Conservatives hate the book because it excoriates Ronald Reagan, gives detailed examples of U.S. imperialism, outlines practices that led to the slaughter and depopulation of Native Americans, and even questions the motives of George Washington and other Founding Fathers. (Among other things, Zinn refers to Washington as a member of the elite who personally benefited from the Constitution.)
Anthony Ramirez, in the NYT (Oct. 13, 2004):PRESIDENT KENNEDY is slightly out of focus on the classroom's video screen. The female reporter in the flowered hat asks the president her usual question about what he has done lately for "equal rights for women." It is a televised news conference from the early 1960's. "Well," the president says, gri
John Grace, The Guardian (London), 12 Oct. 2004
Five years ago, scarcely a week went by without a media appearance from David Cesarani. The history of the Nazis and the Holocaust were in vogue and the country's leading specialist in Jewish history was top of every editor's wish list of pundits."It was a strange time," he recalls."The resurgence in Nazi scholarship due to the opening of the archives after the collapse of the former eastern bloc coincided with events in Rwanda, Bosnia a
Matt Chayes & Rob Mintzes, in http://www.bupipedream.com/100804/news/n3.htm:
The history professor sat on the edge of his bed, cowering. He’d decided that it was time to end his life. The depression had become too much to bear.
“I was one of the most engaged members of the faculty, before it crippled me,” Adalberto Lopez, 61, recalled. “Because of my cultural background and my arrogance as an intellectual,
Mary Ryllis Clark, in the Australian Age (Oct. 5, 2004):
Historian Stuart Macintyre thought the Howard Government a temporary aberration when it won the election in 1996. He acknowledges that he misjudged the change of mood, but as he points out in the new last chapter of his recently reissued A Concise History of Australia, historians are not futurologists.This
Clifford Krauss, The New York Times, 29 Sept. 2004
As one of Canada's pre-eminent historians, David Bercuson of the University of Calgary is not your average couch potato. But with beer in hand and feet up on the sofa, he watched the Olympics on television last month to cheer on the world champion hurdler Perdita Felicien to win a gold medal for Canada.
When Ms. Felicien inexplicably stumbled into the very first hurdle like a rank amateur, Mr. Bercuson dashed straight to his com
Arnold Abrams, in Newsday (Sept. 19, 2004):Once upon a time, roughly six decades ago, a teenage David Kahn, strolling the streets of his hometown, glanced into the window of Great Neck's public library and was attracted by a mysterious-looking book.
The title,"Secret and Urgent," was intriguing, but its cover - depicting a jumble of let
Norman Cantor died this past week. Two blog entries on HNN illuminate controversies in which he was involved:
Hugo Schwyzer:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/7548.html
Jonathan Dresner:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/7554.html
Jo-Ann Moriarty, in the Republican (Sept. 20, 2004): ... Friends and colleagues at both Smith College and Boston University described Weinstein as someone who is very bright, charming, controversial, an opportunist, a serious scholar and historian and as someone whose politics shifted from the liberal left in the 1960s to the right.
Still, colleagues at Smith who had
Pamela Gould, at Fredericksburg.com (Sept. 11, 2004): A vivid image came to John Hope Franklin's mind when then-Gov. L. Douglas Wilder approached him in the early 1990s about creating a museum to tell the story of slavery.
It should be built in Jamestown and the museum itself should be a slave ship, he thought almost immediately."This would be a dramatic presentation of the wa
Hillel Italie, in the Concord
Monitor (Sept. 9, 2004):Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 86 years old and never more liberal, stares calmly
from behind his large, clear-framed glasses and reviews the current stage of
what he has called the "cycles" of American politics. The historian has long theorized that the United States alternates between
Teresa K. Weaver, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
05 Sept. 2004"History is lived forward but is written in retrospect," wrote the late British historian C.V. Wedgwood."We know the end before we consider the beginning, and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only."
Good historians often cite the wisdom of Wedgwood. They know that all history is subjective --- human beings are involved, after all.
"Historians are prisoners of their own experience
Michael Powell, in the Washington Post (Aug. 29, 2004):-- Utter three words -- George Walker Bush -- and watch eminent author Kevin
Phillips, a longtime Republican, a former Nixon aide and past party theoretician,
pucker like he has inhaled a pickle. "I've never understood why we take Bush and his family seriously,"
he says. "They come from the investment-inherited-money wing of the Republican
Party. They display no real empathy for anyon
Ann Gerhart, in the Wash Post (Aug. 28, 2004):Nobody picked on his Rosa Parks biography. Who would pick on Rosa Parks? Or sneered at his works on Jimmy Carter or Henry Ford. But a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, historian Douglas Brinkley published his eighth book,"Tour of Duty," an exploration of how Vietnam shaped Sen. John Kerry. A vet named Jim Rassmann, a Repub
James Varney, in the New
Orleans Times Picayune (Aug. 27, 2004):In recent weeks, the University
of New Orleans scholar has emerged as a central figure in the highly partisan
debate about Democratic candidate John Kerry's actions in combat during the Vietnam
War. Brinkley's writings about Kerry -- in particular his biography "Tour
of Duty," which was made with Kerry's co
Curt Guyette, in Metro
Times (Detroit) (Aug. 25, 2004):Like the history that he teaches,
Juan Cole’s emergence as a 21st century media phenomenon is the product of
convergence. Geopolitics and technology and professional pursuits have combined
to transform a once-obscure university professor into an analyst hundreds of thousands
of people are turning to as an alternative source of information rega
