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.
Ian Buruma, in the New Yorker (June 14-21, 2004): In the course of a distinguished academic career at the University of London and at Princeton, Bernard Lewis has never been afraid to dip his scholarly hands in the muck of current affairs. A mentor to Henry (Scoop) Jackson in the early nineteen-seventies, and a friend to several Israeli Prime Ministers, Lewis has been especia
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, in the Financial Times (London) (June 12, 2004): Antony Beevor has taken a break from military history to publish his first biography, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. "It was an absolute holiday to write - a family story that conveys a huge sweep of history but doesn't have the cumulative horrors of Stalingrad and Berlin," he says, referring to his previous books about the siege of Stalingrad and fall of Hitler. "Frankly, at the end of Ber
Jacob Heilbrunn, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, in the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
(June 14, 2004): It's no secret that the Bush administration has a fetish for secrecy. Whether it's keeping the records of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force concealed or denying the 9-11 commission key documents, the administration regularly displays disdain for open government.
But does that contempt extend even to the office of the national ar
Jeff Guinn, in
fortwayne.com (June 16, 2004):Anyone who doesn't believe we lost one of our finest historians when 82-year-old
William Manchester died June 1 should check out the 34-page preamble in 1988's
"Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone: 1932-1940," the second volume of
Manchester's justly lauded "Last Lion" series on the life of the world
leader.
HNN blogger Tom Bruscino (June 8, 2004): With Memorial Day and the 60th Anniversary of D-Day over the last two weekends, attention has once again turned toward military history. The rush of book reviews of World War II has once again brought to the fore an issue that deserves closer scrutiny: the ongoing and offhand evisceration of the work of Stephen Ambrose by some professional book review
Derek Catsam, reviewing a blog posting by Andrew Sullivan:
Once again Andrew Sullivan shows his occasional tendencies toward intellectual sloppiness. To use his own self important phrase, let's"fisk" this piece (with a heading titled"Always Wrong" that should give you a hint of what foll
Dale McCartney, in Left Hook (May 2004): On Thursday the 25th of March, the first of the 4-day annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Howard Zinn was honoured with an evening spot as a plenary speaker. He spoke on “The Uses of History,” clearly a topic that he is uniquely positioned to discuss. There is an irony in a professional association of historians inviting a speaker who has
Steven Zeitchik, in the WSJ
(June 3, 2004):When William Manchester died earlier this week at age 82, the literary community
mourned the death of a great biographer. Best known for his controversial portrayal
of the Kennedys, he had later in his career earned fame for a different subject.
In the first two volumes of "The Last Lion," his acclaimed series
on Wins
Steve Russ, Eleanor Robson, Rona Epstein, and David Epstein in the London
Independent (May 24, 2004):AS THE first Manager of the Mathematics Research Centre at Warwick University,
from 1967, David Fowler played an important part in establishing, through the
research symposia organised at the centre, the outstanding international reputation
that Warwick now enjoys in many branches of mathematics. As a distinguished
scholar of the history of mathematics he h
Ernie Suggs, in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution (May 23, 2004):Few people alive know the intricacies surrounding the work and process that
led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision as well as John Hope Franklin.
And it is not because he is one of America's foremost historians, who penned
the classic reader "From Slavery to Freedom."It was because h
John Crace, in the Gardian (May 18, 2004):The room looks exactly as you might expect. Books of campaigns are piled floor
to ceiling and there are battered helmets, rusty shell cases, rolled-up maps
and regimental memorabilia occupying every spare surface. It seems perfectly
to sum up the part-scholar, part-man of action in the field that makes up the
somewhat old-fashioned on-screen persona of military historian Richard Holmes.
Which makes it a shoo-in pho
Philip Kennicott, in the Washington Post (May 13, 2004):It's only 8:30 a.m. on the East Coast, so some of the angry Americans dialing
into the glass-walled C-SPAN studio with the perfect view of the Capitol are
very early risers. In the "Washington Journal" hot seat, for 45 minutes,
is Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University
and author of a new book about colonialism, memory and U.S. policy in the Middle
Sam Hodges, in the Charlotte Observer (May 18, 2004): After Fidel Castro took control of Cuba, thousands of middle- and upper-class parents in that country sent their children to the United States. The mass migration became known as Operation
Glenn Garvin, author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras, in Reason
magazine, in the course of an article prompted by the book, In Denial, to which Eric Foner (below) responded (April 2004):In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays
from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in
a book titled After Brezhn
Omar Ford, in the Beaufort
Gazette (May 14, 2004):Beaufort High School is a decidedly different school than it was during the
1970s, recalls Glenda Gilmore a professor at Yale.
Gilmore was a budding history teacher at Beaufort High when the Supreme Court's
1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., decision was finally impacting
Beaufort in 1970. Li
Avi Shlaim, in the course of an
interview in the Palestine Chroncile (May 14, 2004):You were born in Baghdad. Do you have any memories of living in Iraq? I was born in 1945, and my family left Iraq in 1950. I was 5 years old, and
hadn’t started going to school so I never learned to read and write Arabic.
I have only disjointed memories of life in Iraq. My fath
Jonathan Calt Harris, in frontpagemag.com
(May 14, 2004):Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer at Berkeley in Islamic Studies, recently went
on television and was put on the defensive by Bill O’Reilly. The subject
was comments Bazian had made at a left-wing rally in San Francisco on April
10, 2004, calling for an “intifada” in the United States. As reported by LittleGre
Elizabeth Wasserman, in the Atlantic (April 29, 2004):In the foreword to an Arabic edition of one of Bernard Lewis's recent books, published by the Muslim Brotherhood, the translator included a few words of ambiguous praise for the author. Lewis was, he wrote,"one of two things: a candid friend or an honorable enemy," but certainly not one to dodge the truth.
In
Jon Wiener, in the LAT (May 2, 2004): Go ahead, try. Name the archivist of the United States.
It's a pretty fair bet you failed. The archivist, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, oversees the nation's most important documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The position has traditionally been one of the lower-profile jobs in the fed
From the Boston Globe (May 6, 2004):A QUOTATION from Douglas Brinkley in Alex
Beam's column "Historian's 'duty': PR for Kerry?" (April 29) leaves
the impression that Brinkley has been misleading about interviews he conducted
with John Kerry's crewmates. For the record, the introduction to the excerpts
from Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," published in The Atlantic and approved
by Brink
