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: Kansas City Star
7-20-13
Don’t underestimate the reach of “The Daily Show.”After Jonathan Sperber, a University of Missouri history professor, appeared on the show in April to discuss “Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life,” his biography of the German philosopher and revolutionary, he heard from several old friends.
“That included the girl I had a crush on in 1966,” Sperber said recently....
Source: jconline.com
7-20-13
What would the late historian Howard Zinn have been doing in the classroom last week after being called out as a fraud, his name dragged around three years ago by a man who was then Indiana’s governor and now president of one of the state’s major research universities?“He would teach the controversy,” said Nadine Dolby, a Purdue University professor watching as a beloved teacher from her days at Boston University was publicly upbraided by the president of her present university. “That’s just what he’d do.”...To Dolby, a curriculum studies professor in the College of Education, her professor’s story is one of dissent. She calls Zinn a role model when it comes to professors. And she recounts several stories about her time in class and beyond with Zinn in her 2011 book, “Rethinking Multicultural Education for the Next Generation.” Here’s her take.
Source: Cornell News
7-19-13
Eminent historian Andrew Roberts will offer a course at Cornell this fall as the inaugural Merrill Visiting Professor in History. His lecture course, Great European Leaders of the 19th and 20th Centuries and their Influence on History, will investigate the roles of 12 influential figures, including Napoleon, Stalin, Churchill and Thatcher.The visiting professorship is made possible by the Merrill family, who also support the annual Merrill Presidential Scholars Program and provided major funding for Cornell’s Merrill Family Sailing Center....
Source: Waterbury Republican-American
7-19-13
WATERBURY — A 74-year-old community college professor was found guilty of risk of injury to a minor, but was cleared of sexual assault Wednesday in Waterbury Superior Court.Mirvet Muca, an associate professor of political science and history at Naugatuck Valley Community College, is still employed by the school, but an official there said Thursday his status is under review....
Source: Queen's University Journal
7-19-13
A woman who received two threatening letters on Wednesday for being in a same-sex relationship is revealed to be Queen’s University history professor Karen Dubinsky.Dubinsky and her partner Susan Belyea say they received two letters that claimed affiliation with a Christian group based in the “Deep South,” which told the couple to move from Kingston or be subject to “deadly serious consequences.”...
Source: South China Morning Post
7-20-13
A translated work that apparently censored remarks on politics - such as Democratic Party founding chairman Martin Lee Chu-ming comparing the handover of Hongkongers to China to "surrendering Jews to Adolf Hitler's Germany" - will be recalled after its writer cried foul over the unapproved changes.The book's mainland-funded local publisher, Chung Hwa Book Company, agreed last night to withdraw the Chinese edition of A Concise History of Hong Kong from sale. It also apologised to the history professor who penned the work in English.Professor John Carroll, associate dean of the University of Hong Kong's arts faculty, earlier said he was "shocked and disappointed" about the changes....
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail
7-19-13
Once the dynamic heart of automotive America, the city of Detroit took the humbling step of filing for bankruptcy on Thursday – the largest U.S. municipality ever to do so. On Friday, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder defended his decision to authorize the bankruptcy filing....The Globe’s Joanna Slater spoke with Thomas Sugrue, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, an award-winning social history of the once-proud city, about its long decline....What are the most important factors that contributed to Detroit’s current mess?
Source: Ogden Standard-Examiner
7-19-13
OGDEN — “There are only two kinds of people who smile all the time: fools and Americans.”“It’s a great, old Russian saying,” said Susan Matt, Weber State University history department chairwoman and professor. “Americans tend to seem happy all the time, even if they are not, underneath.”Matt just returned from an Organization of American Historians fellowship that took her to Germany to teach a university course about emotions in United States history. And although most of her students at the University of Tübingen were fluent in English, Matt did encounter the occasional cultural divide.“I would say something and pause for a laugh, and there would be deafening silence,” Matt recalled with a laugh. “I would realize that a joke didn’t translate. So I suggested someone write a paper on American humor, and the differences between German and American humor.”...
Source: HNN staff
7-19-13
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition announced on Thursday the finalists for the $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize, awarded to books dedicated to African American history.This year's finalists are Stephen Kantrowitz's More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829-1889 (Penguin), Sydney Nathans's To Free a Family: The Journey of Mary Walker (Harvard) , and Brett Rushforth's Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous & Atlantic Slaveries in New France (University of North Carolina).Stephen Kantrowitz is professor of history and director of graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Nathans is professor emeritus of history at Duke, and Brett Rushforth is associate professor of history and director of graduate studies at William & Mary.The winner will be announced in the fall, and the award will be presented in New York City in February.
Source: Otago Daily Times (NZ)
7-19-13
Despite rape and other sexual assaults having low conviction rates, a London-based historian is optimistic this situation can be changed and offending reduced.Prof Joanna Bourke, author of a book titled Rape, A History from 1860 to the Present (2007), said in Dunedin this week that rape and other sexual assaults were issues for men and society, not just for women.Her optimism came partly from her perspective as an historian: ''I can see that things have changed and ... they can change again.'...
Source: The Advocate
7-18-13
A Philadelphia historian sparked a days-long — and so far fruitless — archival search when she challenged her blog readers to take an “impossible” test purportedly once given to prospective black voters in Louisiana.The test, which asks the taker to “spell backwards, forwards” among other tasks, went viral on the Internet after it posted on a noted civil rights history website. The Tennessee State Archives put a copy in its collections. Teachers are using it in their history lessons. However, history experts in Louisiana do not have a copy of it.“I suspected that was a hoax,” Andrew Salinas, reference archivist for the Amistad Research Center at Tulane University, said Wednesday.A former civil rights worker who insists the test was given offered another explanation. Jeff Schwartz said Louisiana might have been reluctant to preserve an embarrassing chapter in its history....
Source: The Daily Beast
7-17-13
From an interview with The Daily Beast's Noah Charney....Describe your morning routine.Absolutely. When I want to write, at home, I get up about 5, make coffee, slowly begin to be conscious. I’ll do a fair amount of other work, check email and Facebook and news sites, then I’ll bring my wife coffee and read the newspaper. It’s a long day’s reaching consciousness. By 8 I like to be at the computer and I like to write until about noon.Do you like to map out your books ahead of time, or just let it flow?I write my first draft on the computer. I used to write everything out by hand, but just don’t have the time, patience, or legible handwriting to make that possible anymore. I like to write quickly, so in ideal conditions I’ll have done a lot of research, made a lot of notes, before I sit down. But I don’t do an outline. By the time I could do an outline, I’ll already know what I need to say, so I’ll just sit and write.What do you need to have produced/completed in order to feel that you’ve had a productive writing day?
Source: UPI
7-17-13
The not guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman case has me thinking a lot about a book I first encountered in seminary, Is God a White Racist?, by the Rev. Dr. Bill Jones. As a budding seminary student, it took me by surprise. Now, as a wiser, older professor looking at the needless death of Trayvon Martin, I have to say: I get it.God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in a nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem. More importantly, he is carrying a gun and stalking young black men.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
7-17-13
Mitch Daniels, as an unconventional choice to become Purdue University's president, has repeatedly pledged his strong commitment to academic freedom. And many professors -- including some who had questioned the wisdom of appointing a governor as university president -- have given him high marks for the start of his work at Purdue.But on Monday, the Associated Press published an article based on e-mail records it obtained under Indiana's open records laws. Those e-mail records showed Daniels, while governor of Indiana, asking that no public universities teach the work of Howard Zinn, seeking a statewide investigation into "what is credit-worthy" to see that similar works were not being taught for credit, and considering ways to cut state funds to a program led by a professor who had criticized him.
Source: HNN staff
7-18-13
The Network of Concerned Historians, a Dutch-based advocacy group, released its 2013 report on history and human rights on Thursday.The report covers 97 countries and criticizes the United States for its failure to prosecute alleged human rights violations under the George W. Bush administration, as well as the suppression of evidence of Soviet war crimes by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II.The CIA and the Pentagon also come under scrutiny. In May 2012, the CIA refused to declassify part of its official internal history of the Bay of Pigs invasion, though the legal case is now under review, while the Pentagon censored 198 passages in Anthony Shaffer's Operation Dark Heart, a memoir of an intelligence officer in Afghanistan.
Source: AHA Today
7-16-13
Courtesy Julie-Irene Nkodo, project assistant at the AHA.Bernadotte Schmitt Grant: to support research in the history of Europe, Asia, and AfricaJeffrey Ahlman, Smith College “Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana.”Laura Beers, American University “Red Ellen: Socialist, Feminist, Internationalist.”Alexander Bevilacqua, Princeton University “Islamic Culture in the European Enlightenment.”Jessica Clark, McGill University “Imperial Beauty: The Global Trade in Appearance, 1830-1930.”Surekha Davies, Western Connecticut State University “Mapping the Peoples of the New World: Ethnography, Imagery and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe.”Erin Hochman, Southern Methodist University “Anschluss before Hitler: The Politics of Transborder Nationalism in Germany and Austria, 1918-1938.”
Source: Illinois Times
7-13-13
A GROUP of leading academics is calling on the Scottish Government to intervene in a controversy over the Catholic Archives in Edinburgh.Historians Professor Dauvit Broun, Professor Thomas Owen Clancy, Dr Jenny Wormald, and Professor Ewen Cameron have already attempted to force the issue on the Parliament's Public Petitions Committee, calling for the Church to reverse plans to split the archives, dating back to Mary, Queen of Scots, and move on claims they are deteriorating.Although the committee has responded claiming the bid was outside its remit, it has advised those behind it to enrol the support of sympathetic politicians if they want a debate on the issue in Parliament....
Source: UPenn News
7-12-13
Michael Katz has been elected to the American Philosophical Society. He is the Walter H. Annenberg professor of history and a research associate at the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. Election to the APS recognizes accomplishments in math and physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences, humanities and the arts and various professions and recognizes leaders in public and private affairs....
Source: ABC News (AU)
7-12-13
An oral history project will document the life stories of gay and lesbian Australians in a first comprehensive record of the changing attitudes to homosexuality.The joint three-year project by Macquarie University and the National Library of Australia will use historians from the University of Queensland and the University of Melbourne to record the life stories of 60 gay and lesbian people across Australia.Professor Clive Moore, who is involved in gathering the interviews from the University of Queensland, says the project is looking to hear from a range of perspectives."We want to gather [stories] from people who were born from about 1940 through to the younger generation that might be 20 years-old," Professor Moore says....
Source: NYT
7-10-13
A group of prominent writers and scholars filed a lawsuit on Wednesday to stop the New York Public Library from demolishing the stacks in its flagship 42nd Street building or moving any books off the site. The complaint, filed in New York State Supreme Court, formalizes concerns about the Central Library Plan, which would replace the stacks with a circulating library and is expected to cost at least $300 million.
“Removal of the stacks, and the off-site displacement of the materials they hold, threatens to endanger the central library’s status as one of the world’s leading research facilities,” the complaint says, “and irrevocably alter the architectural integrity of the central library, a New York City landmark and a national historic landmark.” The plaintiffs include the writer Edmund Morris; the historian David Nasaw; Joan W. Scott, a social science professor at the Institute for Advanced Study; and Stanley N. Katz, a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton.
Along with the library and its executives, the lawsuit names the city and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg as defendants.
