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.
Source: Phys.org
8-19-13
The tension and unrest that arose in Egypt last month after the army ousted democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi exploded this week, with hundreds of people killed as security forces broke up camps of protesters demanding Morsi's return.The widening violence raised questions about the democratic future of a key American ally and an important partner in Middle East peace efforts, and also cast a shadow over the durability of changes wrought in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.To better understand what's going on in Egypt, Gazette staff writer Alvin Powell spoke with Harvard's E. Roger Owen, A. J. Meyer Professor of Middle East History Emeritus, about the fighting and about what Egypt's future might hold.GAZETTE: What is at the roots of the clashes going on in Egypt today?OWEN: Well, I think there are two roots. One is a very long antipathy—or fight to the death—between the army and the Muslim Brothers. Most of the time since the [Gamal Abdel] Nasser revolution of 1952, the army has been involved in putting Muslim Brothers in jail. So there's no love lost between them.
Source: Santa Cruz Sentinel
8-17-13
SANTA CRUZ -- UC Santa Cruz's first free course offered on the online Coursera platform has drawn more 18,000 participants, exceeding expectations by instructors of the 10-week literature and history class on the Holocaust."I'm a great believer and am happy this is going on," said professor Peter Kenez, who along with professor Murray Baumgarten have taught the popular course to 300 students at UCSC for decades."All of the student reactions are very positive."Coursera offers more than 400 free courses from more than 60 universities, and students can earn certificates of completion after receiving peer-graded work. UCSC launched the course in July after announcing in February that it was one of four UC campuses that would partner with Coursera, which recently announced $43 million in venture capital investment to support growth....
Source: Al Jazeera
8-15-13
In January 2013, France sent a few thousand troops to Mali in a bid to combat rebel fighters who had seized control of the north of the country and were threatening to advance on the capital.The intervention shed light on some of France's historical relationships with its former colonies. But what do the country's historic ties with Africa say about its recent political moves?Dr Lansine Kaba is a distinguished scholar, writer and professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. He is the recipient of the distinguished Melville J. Herskovits Prize for best work in English in African Studies. Al Jazeera's Heather Roy spoke to this leading historian on Africa about the France-Africa connection and what role, if any, this relationship plays today.Al Jazeera: What does the term 'Francafrique' mean?Lansine Kaba: Francafrique involves a complex web of relations that have made France a major player in the affairs of many African countries and even of the African Union. Through the networks of this largely “opaque conglomerate”, France, a founding member of the UN Security Council and the World Bank, can boast a significant global influence that extends far beyond the French-speaking states.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
8-15-13
Second Life, the virtual world many professors use for experiential learning, is no longer big enough for one University of Arizona professor.Bryan Carter, an assistant professor of Africana studies, has been using the virtual world to teach students about the Harlem Renaissance since 2005. But as technology has advanced, Mr. Carter has been looking to evolve his virtual city as well. Now the virtual-life company Utherverse is building a new digital replica of Harlem during the 1920s, based on a street grid Mr. Carter has provided. The company is relying on the Unity engine, a cross-platform game engine that employs open graphics standards.It’s “a huge step up” from Second Life, Mr. Carter said in an e-mail....
Source: Clemson News
8-14-13
CLEMSON — Clemson University history professor Roger Grant is the bronze winner of ForeWord Review’s Book of the Year Award for history. He won the accolade for his book "Railroads and the American People," a social history of the impact of railroads on American life, published in 2012 by Indiana University Press.“How the railroad has affected people has long intrigued me,” said Grant. “This book has allowed me the opportunity to explore that fascinating relationship.”The ForeWord Reviews’ Book of the Year Awards is judged by a select group of librarians and booksellers from around the country. There were 1,300 entries from more than 600 publishers and 248 winners were selected from 62 categories. Grant was the bronze winner in the genre of history....
Source: MIT News
8-14-13
The eminent historian Pauline Maier, whose award-winning books cast new light on Revolutionary-era America and the foundations of U.S. democracy, died Aug. 12 in Cambridge, Mass., after a battle with lung cancer. She was 75.Maier, who served as the William Kenan Jr. Professor of History at MIT, had been a member of the Institute’s faculty since 1978. Her work often recast conventional wisdom about 18th-century America, reconstructing long-forgotten public debates over the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution while bringing crucial figures in American political history into sharper focus....
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
8-8-13
Nathaniel Popkin is the author of Song of the City: An Intimate History of the American Urban Landscape.Perhaps no book has better clarified the story of 20th century urban decline than the 1996 Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton Press) by Penn historian Tom Sugrue. That book, which won the Bancroft Prize in 1998 and cemented Sugrue’s place among the top urban historians, illuminated the ways in which racism, federal policy, and corporate disinvestment combined to send Detroit—and dozens of other industrial cities—into freefall. Sugrue, who grew up in Detroit and lives in Mount Airy, is a careful observer of both his cities.
Source: openDemocracy
7-29-13
Giuseppe Acconcia: Professor Beinin, we are told that the Muslim Brothers have been abandoned by the armed forces to foster a government more engaged in the defense of social justice, as requested by millions of protesters, is this true?Joel Beinin: To be sure the army is aware that with this economic crisis, with rising prices and the fall in the import of wheat, the Egyptian people’s social rights have to be addressed. I would not say that the new government looks likely to follow this path. The prime minister Hazim Beblawi is a man of the centre and his government arises out of an agreement between the youth movements, the liberal party al-Dostour, led by Mohammed el-Baradei, and the Nasserists, supporting Hamdin Sabbahi: it is not a leftist coalition....
Source: The Nation
8-8-13
Jon Wiener teaches US history at UC Irvine.Dan Savage started the “It Gets Better” project in 2010, with a short video online addressed to gay, lesbian, bi and transgender young people facing harassment, letting them know that, yes, it gets better. Today more than 50,000 people have posted videos at ItGetsBetter.org, which have been viewed more than 50 million times. He’s also a best-selling author whose new book is American Savage. He lives in Seattle with his husband, Terry, and their 15-year-old son, D.J. Jon Wiener: How did you feel when you first heard the news that the Supreme Court had overruled DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act that had defined marriage as limited to two people of the opposite sex? I’m morbid, so my first thought was ‘I can die now.’Dan Savage: You didn’t think “now we can live happily ever after”?
Source: WSJ
8-5-13
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson discusses his latest book "The Savior Generals" with Peter Robinson. Hanson identifies the shared characteristics of generals throughout history who saved wars deemed "lost." "Uncommon Knowledge" is produced by the Hoover Institution.
Source: NYT
8-7-13
Robert N. Bellah, a distinguished sociologist of religion who sought nothing less than to map the American soul, in both the sacred and secular senses of the word, died on July 30 in Oakland, Calif. He was 86.His death, from complications of recent heart surgery, was announced by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Elliott professor emeritus of sociology.Throughout his work, Professor Bellah was concerned with the ways in which faith shapes, and is shaped by, American civic life. He was widely credited with helping usher the study of religion — a historically marginalized subject in the social sciences — into the sociological fold.“Modern America has a soul, not only a body, and Bellah probed that soul more deeply and subtly than anyone in his field or his time,” Steven M. Tipton, a professor in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, wrote in an e-mail on Monday....
Source: WaPo
8-7-13
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — After a tragedy like the Trayvon Martin killing, calls routinely arise for a conversation about race.But Henry Louis Gates thinks the more direct way for structural change is through schools and their curriculum.That’s what he’s hoping will happen with “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” a six-hour PBS documentary series that traces 500 years of black history.“To tell the whole sweep of African-American history — no one’s tried to do that. That was what we were crazy enough to do,” Gates said in an interview on Wednesday....
Source: Inside Higher Ed
8-7-13
A master’s degree in teaching costs about $6,400 a semester for a full-time North Carolina resident attending East Carolina University’s College of Education, meaning a four-semester program would cost about $26,000. But, according to the North Carolina state legislature, that doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.In the most recent state budget passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor last week, North Carolina lawmakers eliminated a provision – which exists in many states – that granted automatic pay raises to public school teachers who completed master’s degrees. It was one of several changes the budget made to teacher compensation and working conditions, including ending teacher tenure, but it is the one likely to have the largest impact on the state’s higher education institutions.The elimination of the benefit could have a significant effect on enrollment in education schools at North Carolina colleges and universities. And since many of those programs generate net revenues for the institutions, enrollment declines could affect their bottom lines....
Source: HNN staff
8-7-13
Bob Filner, the embattled mayor of San Diego who faces allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, taught in the history department at San Diego State University for over twenty years before running for Congress in 1993.
Filner, who was born in Pittsburgh, received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Science and Politics in England, 1930-1945: The Social Relations of Science Movement,” was completed under the supervision of L. Pearce Williams in 1973. He was employed as a historian of science by San Diego State from 1970 until his election to Congress in 1993.
HNN filed a public records request at SDSU for Filner's employment records, but we were informed that all employment files at that university are purged after ten years.
Source: MSN News
8-2-13
Ben Urwand has apparently done what no historian has previously been able to do: Draw not just one but many substantial links between 1930s Hollywood and the Nazi Germany regime of Adolf Hitler.Urwand's revelations were first revealed in a June issue of online monthly Tablet. According to The New York Times, "that the German government meddled in the film industry during Hollywood's so-called golden age has long been known to film historians ... But Mr. Urwand, 35, offers the most stinging take by far, drawing on material from German and American archives to argue that the relationship between Hollywood and the Third Reich ran much deeper — and went on much longer — than any scholar has so far suggested."...
Source: LA Times
7-31-13
Historian Brenda E. Stevenson (pictured in her UCLA office, with an African sculpture) mostly writes about the long-gone — 18th and 19th century African Americans, and the lives of enslaved women. Then came the case that made history while L.A. watched: Korean-born shopkeeper Soon Ja Du killed black teenager Latasha Harlins over a bottle of orange juice. A jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter, but she was sentenced only to probation and community service.Stevenson's new book, "The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins," analyzes the other "no justice, no peace" case that echoes through the 1992 riots and into the present day.Thirteen days after the Rodney King beating, Harlins was shot and killed. Where were you when all of this happened?
Source: Gulf News
8-4-13
London: The historian Mary Beard has become the latest woman to receive a tweeted bomb threat, sent on the eve of a boycott by many of Twitter in protest at its slow response to dealing with violent and obscene threats.Although many stayed off the site, the hashtags #Twittersilence and #connectwithrespect were trending, with many comments like David Howell’s: “Time spent enjoying @wmarybeard on twitter is time well spend. Time saved by ignoring idiots is time well saved,” and others pointing out that both women and men have been the victims of vitriolic abuse....
Source: Leicester Mercury (UK)
8-6-13
Historian Dr John Ashdown-Hill claims he has been airbrushed out of the city's Richard III story, despite making one of the project's pivotal discoveries.On Monday, February 4, the University of Leicester announced to an astonished world's press that it had identified the Greyfriars remains as those of King Richard III.Academics explained how the skeleton's DNA matched with that of Canadian furniture maker, Michael Ibsen - who had been proven to be the monarch's 16th great grandnephew....
Source: Deadline Detroit
8-6-13
"On The Media," National Public Radio's weekly show, took on the way journalists and other commentators have used Detroit's bankruptcy to draw a larger picture of what is wrong with the country -- often with an ideological bent that suits their own purposes. "Pundits and pontificators have seized on the moment to lay blame on their favorite targets and reductively declare that what ails Detroit is a microcosm of what ails America," said co-host Bob Garfield, who interviewed Northwestern University history professor Kevin Boyle on the most recent show.Boyle, who grew up on Detroit's East Side and attended the University of Detroit and received his master's degree and Ph.D from the University of Michigan, is the author of "Arc of Justice," the award-winning 2004 book about the Ossian Sweet case and Detroit in the 1920s, when, as he wrote, Detroit experienced explosive growth and the whole city seemed to function as one, huge, automobile-producing machine....
Source: International Business Times
8-6-13
Controversial historian David Irving is to hold a talk on SS chief Heinrich Himmler later this month.Irving, who has served time in jail in Austria for holocaust denial, will address audiences in Newcastle Upon Tyne and then Edinburgh, Scotland, on 27 and 28 August.Promotional material for the talks on Irving's website includes the 75-year-old visiting Himmler's field headquarters and also the home in which the prominent Nazi died. The events are likely to draw protests from far-left groups which call Irving a Nazi sympathiser for comments he made about the genocide of Jews by the Nazi regime during World War II....
