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: St. Louis Jewish Light
5-29-13
WARSAW, Poland (JTA) — Polish historian Prof. Krzysztof Jasiewicz [not to be confused with the anthropology professor of the same name at Washington and Lee University, to whom he is not related] was dismissed from the Polish Academy of Sciences following an interview in which he partly blames Jews for the Holocaust.Jasiewicz, 61, will lose his position as head of the Department of Analysis of Eastern Issues on June 1 but announced that he will appeal the decision.In the interview, which was published in April in a special edition of Focus magazine on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, Jasiewicz said that “generations of Jews worked for centuries to bring about the Holocaust,” that “without the active participation of the Jews the Holocaust would have been impossible,” and that “it is a waste of time to dialogue with the Jews.”...
Source: Centre Daily Times
5-28-13
A Penn State history professor will take over as director of the honors program started with the help of the family of former head football coach Joe Paterno.Catherine Wanner will become director of the Paterno Fellows Program in the College of the Liberal Arts starting July 1. She succeeds English professor Jack Selzer, who will return to teaching and research under a professorship endowed by the Paterno family.The program is designed to challenge undergraduate students academically and to give them financial support to take on internships, study-abroad programs or research projects. Students have to maintain a 3.4 GPA....
Source: The Tennessean
5-25-13
Lifelong Gallatin resident Walter Thomas Durham, Tennessee’s state historian for the past decade and author of 24 books on Tennessee history, who left a lasting mark especially in his hometown, died on Friday at the age of 88.Durham, a longtime Gallatin businessman and a walking encyclopedia of Tennessee and Sumner County history, was appointed state historian in 2002 by then-Gov. Don Sundquist. He had already served as president of the Tennessee Historical Society, founding president of the Tennessee Heritage Alliance, later renamed the Tennessee Preservation Trust, and chair of the Tennessee Historical Commission....
Source: San Jose Mercury News
5-25-13
In a nationwide push to experiment with online university courses, San Jose State stands at the forefront, making deals with private sector startups to package lectures from Ivy League professors and opening some for-credit classes to the masses.Now, a counterrevolution is underway.In recent weeks, humanities professors -- feeling the withering of their departments and fearing virtual demotions -- have begun to resist calls to abandon traditional teaching methods. In an open letter to a Harvard University professor who offered San Jose State his online social justice course, Cal State philosophy professors argue that momentum is building to dismantle college as we know it, a concern echoing through academic halls nationwide....The letter resonated with Bruce Reynolds, a San Jose State history professor nearing retirement. He said he and his colleagues are frustrated that traditional teaching methods have been dismissed as passe."The philosophy department letter was what woke people up, I think," he said....
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
5-25-13
Robert E. Carlson, 91, a longtime West Chester resident and history professor who led Chester County's 1982 tricentennial celebration, died Thursday, May 16, of respiratory failure at Riddle Memorial Hospital in Media.Born in Johnstown, he earned a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Pittsburgh in 1943.That year, he was commissioned an ensign in the U.S. Navy. He was honorably discharged with rank of lieutenant junior grade in June 1946. He served as a watch and gunnery officer aboard the destroyer USS Hambleton....
Source: NYT
5-19-13
William Miles, a self-taught filmmaker whose documentaries revealed untold stories of black America, including those of its heroic black soldiers and of life in its signature neighborhood, Harlem, where he himself grew up, died on May 12 in Queens. He was 82.The cause was uncertain, but Mr. Miles had myriad health problems, including Parkinson’s disease and dementia, said his wife of 61 years, Gloria.Mr. Miles was part historical sleuth, part preservationist, part bard. His films, which combined archival footage, still photographs and fresh interviews, were triumphs of curiosity and persistence in unearthing lost material about forgotten subjects....
Source: WaPo
5-22-13
Stephen Brumwell has won the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize for his biography of the first president, George Washington: Gentleman Warrior (Quercus).A historian who was born in Portsmouth, England, and now lives in Amsterdam, Brumwell received the award at a ceremony last night at Mount Vernon.The jurors’ citation said, “In the hands of this fine biographer, Washington emerges as a flesh and blood man, more impressive than the mythical hero could ever be.”...
Source: Toronto Sun
5-22-13
A Femen activist protested in Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral on Wednesday, one day after far-right historian Dominique Venner committed suicide inside. Venner shot himself at the altar in front of around 1,500 visitors.Venner condemned both same-sex marriage and Islamist influence in France in writings before his death.The now infamous topless protesters released the following statement along with photographs:"Just right now FEMEN's angel of Death held a mono-protest on the altar of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the same place of yesterday's suicide of fascist activist....
Source: Secrecy News
5-22-13
William Z. Slany, the former Historian of the Department of State and a champion of efforts to declassify the secret history of U.S. foreign policy, passed away earlier this month.Dr. Slany served in the State Department’s Office of the Historian for 42 years, and was The Historian for the last 18 of those years, until his retirement from the Department in September 2000, according to a notice circulated by David H. Herschler, the Deputy Historian of the State Department.In his capacity as Historian of the Department, Dr. Slany helped prepare 16 volumes of the Foreign Relations of the United States series, the official documentary record of U.S. foreign policy, and he oversaw the publication of 125 FRUS volumes. He led an interagency study to prepare a two volume account of “Nazi gold” and other stolen assets from World War II. He participated in the development and implementation of the 1991 statute that formally required the State Department to present a “thorough, accurate, and reliable” record of U.S. foreign policy and diplomatic history....
Source: Mountain Times
5-22-13
With more than 55,000 books in print about the Civil War, one might assume that there is no new information to be gleaned about the event that separated states, communities and families.But there is a topic that has received scant attention — the environmental history of the Civil War.Professor Timothy Silver and associate professor Judkin Browning from the Appalachian State University Department of History have aligned their academic interests on a project that has received a $100,000 collaborative research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.Silver is an environmental historian and the author of “Mount Mitchell and the Black Mountains: An Environmental History of the Highest Peaks in Eastern America” (University of North Carolina Press) and “A New Face on the Countryside: Indians, Colonists and Slaves in South Atlantic Forests, 1500-1800” (Cambridge University Press)....
Source: Economic Times
5-18-13
Safely guarded in an air-conditioned vault in Atlanta, Georgia, lies one of western society's most valuable artefacts. So valuable, that its owner could lose millions if anyone so much as got a look at it. That's what Coca-Cola would have us believe anyway , claiming the only original copy of the soft drink's top-secret recipe lies underneath its US headquarters. But one man is threatening to lift this veil of secrecy this week as he claims to publish a copy of the original formula in a new book. Historian Mark Pendergrast says the recipe was handed down through the family of Frank Robinson, the commercial partner of chemist John Pemberton, who first produced the drink in the summer of 1886.In the third edition of his book, For God, Country and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It', Pendergrast reproduces what he claims to be the same recipe that Pemberton devised over 125 years ago. Among the ingredients in the book are sugar, lime juice, nutmeg and coriander.
Source: Newsworks
5-17-13
Some are baffled and others saddened by the fact that humans put footprints on the moon more than 40 years ago and have not ventured a fraction of that distance from home since. Have we lost our spirit of exploration?Not at all, said Arizona State University historian Stephen Pyne, but we're seeing the end of one great era of exploration and the start of a new one. In a talk May 15 at Drexel University, Pyne said we are just entering a third great era of exploration kicked off by the Voyager spacecraft, which explored thousands of times farther than any human-led expedition could go.The twin spacecraft Voyagers 1 and 2 were launched in 1977 and since then have brought us spectacular pictures not only of the planets but their bizarre and diverse moons. Today, Voyager 1 is on the verge of crossing through a theoretical boundary called the heliopause, which marks the end of the solar wind's reach and the beginning of interstellar space....
Source: KUOW.org
5-21-13
Dominique Venner, a well-known French historian who embraced and wrote about ultra-conservative causes for decades, committed suicide today in front of the alter at Notre Dame Cathedral. He had left a post on his blog decrying the legalization of same sex marriage in France. "An infamous law ... can always be repealed," he wrote. "It will require new, spectacular and symbolic actions to rouse people from their complacency."...
Source: History is More or Less Bunk (blog)
5-20-13
Jonathan Rees is professor of history at Colorado State University -- Pueblo.If you don’t know who “John Henry” was, The Boss will be delighted to sing you one version of the story. Or better yet, read the book by Scott Reynolds Nelson and learn a little bit about all of them. The key point here for understanding that tweet is that the steam hammer killed John Henry, leaving him no time to do other things at all. While MOOC enthusiasts like to claim that their babies will allow professors to get back to the way teaching is supposed to be, anybody who’s paying the least bit of attention to academic politics in this day and age knows that the bean counters will never let that happen. Economically, non-superprofessors will all be as dead as John Henry because killing our jobs is the primary reason that MOOCs exist in the first place....
Source: NYT
5-20-13
The soldiers who landed in Normandy on D-Day were greeted as liberators, but by the time American G.I.’s were headed back home in late 1945, many French citizens viewed them in a very different light.In the port city of Le Havre, the mayor was bombarded with letters from angry residents complaining about drunkenness, jeep accidents, sexual assault — “a regime of terror,” as one put it, “imposed by bandits in uniform.”This isn’t the “greatest generation” as it has come to be depicted in popular histories. But in “What Soldiers Do: Sex and the American G.I. in World War II France,” the historian Mary Louise Roberts draws on French archives, American military records, wartime propaganda and other sources to advance a provocative argument: The liberation of France was “sold” to soldiers not as a battle for freedom but as an erotic adventure among oversexed Frenchwomen, stirring up a “tsunami of male lust” that a battered and mistrustful population often saw as a second assault on its sovereignty and dignity....
Source: NYT
5-20-13
Seated recently in the special collections room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology library, Anders Fernstedt raced through an imposing set of yellowing articles and correspondence.Several years ago Mr. Fernstedt, an independent Swedish scholar who is studying the work of the 20th-century philosopher Karl Popper and several of his colleagues, would have scratched out notes and set aside documents for photocopying.Now, however, his tool of choice is the high-resolution camera on his iPhone. When he found a document of interest, he quickly snapped a photo and instantly shared his discovery with a colleague working hundreds of miles away. Indeed, Mr. Fernstedt, who conducts his research on several continents, now packs his own substantial digital Popper library on the disk of his MacBook Air laptop computer — more than 50,000 PDF files that he can browse through in a flash.
Source: LA Music Blog
5-20-13
Many stories and figures have emerged from the hazy shroud of the genre-defining, five-decades-long sex-, drugs-, and rock n’ roll-fueled bender of The Rolling Stones. God knows some of the stories are exaggerated, while others are even more outrageous than we know.In celebration of The Stones’ 50th anniversary, broadcaster and music historian Pete Fornatale endeavored to get to the bottom of many of the stories surrounding The Rolling Stones’ members and catalog. He passed away in 2012 shortly before the release of his book, 50 Licks: Myths and Stories from Half a Century of the Rolling Stones, earlier this year, but I recently spoke with his two co-authors: son Peter Thomas Fornatale and broadcaster Bernie Corbett....
Source: USA Today
5-15-13
WASHINGTON — Is there a second-term curse?Historian Robert Dallek thinks there just might be — and President Obama's current travails could be the latest example."After one party loses two elections in a row, there's sort of blood in the water," Dallek said in an interview Wednesday on USA TODAY's weekly newsmaker video series, Capital Download. "They're really eager to strike back and reduce the influence, the control of second-term presidents." What's more, a president's shortcomings have had time to surface after four years in office....
Source: NYT
5-17-13
Geza Vermes, a religious scholar who argued that Jesus as a historical figure could be understood only through the Jewish tradition from which he emerged, and who helped expand that understanding through his widely read English translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls, died on May 8 in Oxford, England. He was 88.His death was confirmed by David Ariel, the president of the Oxford Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, where Dr. Vermes was most recently an honorary fellow.Dr. Vermes, born in Hungary to Jewish parents who converted to Christianity when he was 6, was among many scholars after World War II who sought to reveal a “historical Jesus” by painting an objective portrait of the man who grew up in Nazareth about 2,000 years ago and emerged as a religious leader when he was in his 30s....
Source: Charles Barzun in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.
5-13-13
Charles Barzun is an associate professor of law at the University of Virginia.Dear Grandfather,Not long after your death on October 25 of last year, friends and relatives wondered whether I might write something about you. They knew that we had corresponded and that I regularly visited you in San Antonio, so they felt I should put something on record. But when I tried my hand at it, I found it impossible to convey my thoughts or feelings. It then occurred to me that the best way to write about you would be to write to you, as I did for so many years.Naturally, I wasn't about to discuss your many accomplishments—the positions you held, the books you wrote—the obituaries and eulogies for the great Jacques Barzun took care of all that. You were touted as one of the last true public intellectuals: a cultural historian, a philosopher of education, an authority on the English language, a prophet of Western decline. The newspapers relished the fact that you were nearly 105 years old when you passed away.
