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.
Michael Dobbs, in a story about John Kerry's war record in the Wash Post (Aug. 22, 2004):
... March 13 would mark the culmination of Kerry's Vietnam War career. With three Purple Hearts, he became eligible for reassignment. Within three weeks, he was out of Vietnam and headed home after a truncated four-month combat tour.
As commander of PCF-94, Kerry was responsible fo
Jennifer Johnson, a graduate student assigned
by the University of Maryland to attend the hearing on Allen Weinstein as archivist
of the United States: It was encouraging to note that the Senate, as well as many archivists, has
questions on why Governor Carlin was asked to resign as Archivist of the United
States. Hopefully, the Senate Committee will follow through on Senator Levin’s
suggestion tha
Edward Tenner, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only) (Aug. 13, 2004): [Edward Tenner is a senior research associate at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History. He is the author of Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) and Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Cons
Rennie Bruce, in the Press (Christchurch, New Zealand) (Aug. 11, 2004):
If David Irving had not decided to sue an obscure American academic and Penguin Books for allegedly defaming him, his reputation as a historian might, at least to the uninformed, have survived a little longer.He did not have the academic credentials now normally required of professional historians and he was not an academic, but he had over the years won the grudging respect of academics for the stamina a
Scott Morris, in the WSJ (Aug. 12, 2004):Arguably the most influential work of American history is Charles A. Beard's"An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States," published in 1913. Beard's thesis--that our country was born of base economic self-interest and not idealism--became Holy Writ for many historians and social thinkers, launching a quasi-Marxist critique of the entire American project
Susanna Rustin, in the Guardian
(July 31, 2004):On November 11 1944, Paul Fussell woke up surrounded by corp-ses. Drafted into
the American infantry 18 months before, he had been in France just a few weeks
and this was his first night in the line. "Until that moment," he
writes in his memoir Doing Battle (1996), "the only dead people I'd seen
had been
Charles Babington and Brian Faler, in the Wash Post (July 29, 2004):
Historian Robert Caro is most widely known for sharp critiques of politicians, especially President Lyndon B. Johnson.
So it was a little surprising when Caro appeared on the podium of the Democratic convention on Tuesday evening to give a gracious introduction of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
"His brother President John F. Kennedy wrote a famous book, 'Profiles in Courage
Stephen Howe, in openDemocracy.net (July 22, 2004):
[Stephen Howe is Tutor in Politics at Ruskin College, Oxford.]
The opening minutes of the Russell Crowe film Gladiator depict a dramatic confrontation between the armies of imperial Rome and the wild German tribes who resist them. The Germans reject the Roman demand for submission in fairly forthright style – by sending the emissary back to the legions’
P. David Hornik, a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem, in frontpagemag.com (July 14, 2004):
“Today there is no longer the slightest pretense by well-informed Israelis that the Arabs left in 1948 of their own free will or at the behest of foreign despots.” So states Tony Judt in “The Rootless Cosmopolitan,” an article in the July 19 issue of The Nation that is the Foreword to a new collection of Edward Said’s writings (From Oslo t
Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Calt Harris, in the Wash Times (July 9, 2004):
Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, has gained notice for his extremist views on Israel, including recent profiles in both the New York Times and The Washington Post. That extremism comes out when he calls Israel an "apartheid system in creation" and a "racist state"
From the Age (July 9 2004):
Viewed piecemeal, the individual fragments of a jigsaw puzzle don't mean a great deal. Only when painstakingly assembled to complete the picture do the tiny bits make sense.
In many ways, science is not unlike a jigsaw. Experiments yield detailed results but often they are so specific as to be of little or no general application or meaning.
The results
Anders G. Lewis, in Frontpagemag.com (July 8 2004):
Among the A-list of self-declared enemies of the American state, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are the gold standard. But the historian Gabriel Kolko, though less popular than either, has been almost as influential. In the 1960s, Kolko introduced a strident and ideological form of history into the academic world. Writing from a Marxist perspective, he hel
Gregory Melleuish, in the Australian (July 6 2004):
At the end of his afterword to the new updated edition of The History Wars (Melbourne University Press), Stuart Macintyre writes that the"history wars are an ugly side of the Australian present and they debase public life".
This leaves one contemplating a paradox. If Macintyre so disapproves of the history wars, why did he launch this polemical book that he must have known would inflame passions and, having inflamed those pas
From the New York Times (July 4 2004):
In 1998, Ron Chernow, who had written successful biographies of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, told his publisher he planned to write his next book on Alexander Hamilton. He got a chilly reception.
"They said books on the founding fathers did not sell well," Mr. Chernow recalled in an interview last week."They
Levon Sevunts, in the Montreal Gazette (June 26, 2004): It's sometimes hard to explain to non-Armenian friends the need to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government.
"Why don't you let it go?" I often hear. "Get on with your life. It happened 90 years ago, for God's sake."
But for Turkish historian Taner Akcam, the need to recognize and learn from the Armenian genocide is as acut
Jason Burke, in the Guardian (June 27, 2004):IN THE SUMMER of 1989 a young American academic announced, in a relatively obscure conservative foreign policy journal, that history had ended. Or at least soon would. At the time, few had heard of Francis Fukuyama, then working in the US State Department. But then few people thought that the Berlin Wall would be hauled down within years, let alone months. Fukuyama, a modest, quietly spoken man who at 37 appeared to have correctly
Alexander Rose, in National Review (July 1, 2004): The most mammoth footnote ever recorded appears, if memory serves, in a volume of John Hodgson's 19th-century magnum opus, A History of Northumberland, a copy of which I once happened to own. Hodgson, a country vicar and amateur antiquary, knew more about that tumultuo
Sholto Byrnes, in the Independent (June 28, 2004): [Headline:] Arrange to meet Britain's highest-profile historian and you never quite know who'll turn up, says Sholto Byrnes. Will it be the charming, erudite David Starkey, or his terrifying, hypercritical alter ego?
"I bet you've been here for some scandalous liaisons," says a hopeful David Starkey, as
From the Sunday Telegraph-London (June 20 2004):
THE NEW History Phenomenon - the flourishing of history in the media since the late Nineties - now has its own history. Professor David Cannadine of the Institute of Historical Research has collected a group of 11 historians and media folk who - with one signal exception - have written interesting and illuminating essays on diverse aspects of this recent cultural and intellectual revolution.
In a thoughtful introduction, Cannadi
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in the Washington
Monthly (June 2004):In early May, Niall Ferguson, the celebrity Scottish historian, looked out
at a packed house seething with antagonism. He had come to Washington to deliver
a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations defending his idea that the war in
Iraq had not only been the right thing to do, but also ought to be the first
ste
