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: BBC News
2-7-12
Economist and former US Ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith called India a "functional anarchy" some 30 years ago.Now Ramachandra Guha, renowned historian and author of India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, says instability is India's destiny.In a perceptive article in the latest issue of Prospect, Mr Guha explained why."Because of its size and diversity, because of the continuing poverty of many of its citizens, because it is (in historical terms) still a relatively young nation state, and because it remains the most recklessly ambitious experiment in history, the Republic of India was never going to have anything but a rocky ride.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
2-5-12
Niall Ferguson was regarded so highly by his fellow Scotsman Michael Gove that the Education Secretary invited him to advise on the development of a new history syllabus.Ferguson has, though, returned the compliment by announcing that he is quitting this country because its intellectual life is so shallow.“My future is in the US,” declares the presenter of such television programmes as The Ascent of Money. “My son will be a US citizen. That is where I and my wife are probably heading.”...
Source: Boston Globe
2-3-12
When Andrew Darien first attended the University of Michigan in the late 1980s he walked onto the Big Ten school’s track team. By the time he graduated the middle-distance runner was regularly outpacing the scholarship athletes.Hanging his spikes up after graduation, the Salem State University history professor didn’t get back into the game until 16 years later when his son’s preschool teacher told him about a new master’s level running club called the Eliot Track Club....Three years after joining the four-year-old Team Eliot, the Cambridge resident and his teammates set both an American and a world record in the indoor distance medley relay last Friday. Competing at Boston University’s 2012 Terrier Invitational, the team clocked a time of 10 minutes 55.1 seconds to beat the previous record of 11 minutes .02 seconds.
Source: American Public Media
1-30-12
Kai Ryssdal: ... Debt is, in fact, and has been, an American way of life.Louis Hyman is the author of a new book called "Borrow: The American Way of Debt." Thanks for being here.Louis Hyman: Thanks so much for having me on the show.Ryssdal: So you know, people have been borrowing and lending since basically there were paper, right? I mean it's been thousands and thousands of years. What, though, is different about the way we do it? The way Americans do it?
Source: NYT
2-1-12
Nicholas Kristof is a columnist for the NYT....Newt Gingrich, Romney’s main rival for the Republican presidential nomination, is denouncing Romney with one of the ugliest slurs in the Republican lexicon: a Massachusetts moderate. Other moderate Republicans are savaged as RINOs — Republicans in name only — as if they emerged from an ugly mutant strain.Yet, in fact, as a new history book underscores, it is the Gingriches and Santorums who are the mutants. For most of its history, the Republican Party was dominated by those closer to Romney than to social conservatives like Rick Santorum, and it is only in the last generation that the party has lurched to the hard right.The new book, “Rule and Ruin,” by Geoffrey Kabaservice, a former assistant history professor at Yale, notes that, to compete in the primaries, Romney has had to flee from his own political record and that of his father, George Romney, a former governor of Michigan who is a symbol of mainstream moderation.
Source: WaPo
1-20-12
The fantasy find for historian Lonnie G. Bunch III includes a tattered pair of pantaloons made of that old “Negro cloth” and a coarse linen shirt that all but disintegrated on the back of its enslaved owner. Maybe a thrashed pair of brogans, too, worn around the plantation until the soles fell off.“Slave clothing,” Bunch said, almost wistfully, of the most elusive item on his historical wish list. “Still can’t find any.”Bunch, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is tantalized by the possibility that somewhere — in an attic or basement — somebody has work clothing once worn by a black slave.He desperately wants to find, authenticate and restore it, then use the potent symbol of a painful past to humanize the story of slavery. But he and his staff of historical hunter-gatherers haven’t come close....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-11-12
The two students brought back to life on Facebook by a University of Nevada at Reno librarian have been returned to the history books for violating the social network’s terms of service.Facebook shut down the profiles of Joe McDonald and Leola Lewis this morning, according to Donnelyn Curtis, the director of research collections and services at the University of Nevada at Reno. Before the accounts were taken offline, Ms. Curtis used the couple’s profiles to give students a glimpse of university life in the early 20th century. When Ms. Curtis logged in to update their profiles today, she was greeted with a message that said the profiles had been suspended. The development was first reported early today on the social-networking news site Mashable.Facebook’s rules specify that users may not “provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.” Ms. Curtis said she understood why the historical profiles violated Facebook’s policy, but added that she would have appreciated a warning before the company took action....
Source: AHA Today
1-24-12
Whatever might be the truth about the apocalyptic eschatology of the Mayan calendar and its endtimes forecast for the Gregorian 2012, one thing is clear, it seems: The Mayan people knew about extracting pleasures from their existential present, as they appear to have used tobacco. That the peoples of Mesoamerica used nicotine could be surmised from other evidence, but a study published on January 12, 2012, in Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell, provided material evidence of tobacco use by the ancient Maya.
Source: Midland Daily News
1-29-12
Former Midlanders Burton W. and Anita Folsom are the authors of a new book, "FDR Goes to War: How Expanded Executive Power, Spiraling National Debt and Restricted Civil Liberties Shaped Wartime America." The book is published by Simon & Schuster Inc."Did World War II really end the Great Depression -- or did President Franklin Roosevelt's poor judgment and confused management leave Congress with a devastating fiscal mess after the final bomb was dropped?," states the book jacket. "The Folsoms make a compelling case that FDR's presidency led to evasive and self-serving wartime policies."The Folsoms are nationally recognized experts on the economic and domestic policies of Roosevelt....
Source: C-Ville
1-31-12
For most Americans, Monticello is the home of Thomas Jefferson, an icon of American architectural expression, a treasured National Historic Landmark and the only American residence on UNESCO’s prestigious World Heritage List. But it’s also the best documented and best preserved early American plantation, and for that reason, a window into the obscure institution of slavery.Wait now, haven’t we had that conversation before? Thomas Jefferson and slavery. Yes, we have, around a DNA test in 1998 and long before that. Really, since a political journalist named James Callender accused Jefferson in 1803 of keeping a slave named Sally as a “concubine.” These days most scholars of American history believe that Jefferson fathered at least one child, Eston Hemings, and probably all six of the known children of Sally Hemings, a household slave and the daughter of the matriarch Elizabeth Hemings....
Mark Cousins is the Auntie Mame of filmmakers working today. By the end of Cousins’s monumental contribution to cinema, “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” a fifteen-hour voyage into the global history of cinema, you feel as if you have lived that history. It’s a hell of a banquet Cousins puts together for us with a ridiculous amount of energy and passion for his subject–he creates an enthusiastic, addictive survey of the medium through crossing continents, time periods, styles, effects, industry trends, and so forth. To call it “absolute” isn’t necessarily hyperbole.Cinespect caught up with Cousins in time for the MoMA screening of “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” which runs from February 1-16. Our conversation is what follows.
Source: Henry Blodgett for Business Insider
1-30-12
Henry Blodget is co-founder, CEO and Editor-In Chief of Business Insider.On Friday in Davos, I interviewed Harvard professor Niall Ferguson, who has been very vocal in recent years about how the world is careening down an unsustainable path....In one key way, Professor Ferguson now concedes, his adversary Paul Krugman has been right: The U.S. can carry a much-higher debt-to-GDP ratio than he thought. In fact, Ferguson now says, even his Harvard colleague Ken Rogoff, who wrote a seminal book about debt crisis called This Time It's Different, may be too pessimistic about the United States.But Europe, Professor Ferguson says, is still screwed....
Source: Panama City News Herald
1-27-12
William Price is the son of Christina Jeffrey, former Historian of the House of Representatives.As a younger man I had the misfortune of watching my mother being lured into Washington by Newt Gingrich, who hired her as the historian of the House of Representatives when he was speaker of the House.Newt and my mother, Christina Jeffrey, became close friends when she arranged for him to teach a class at Kennesaw State College in Newt’s congressional district, north of Atlanta. When Newt became speaker he had several jobs to dole out, one of which was the historian position. Newt offered the job to my mother, who was a professor at Kennesaw State. She left the security of tenure and crossed the Potomac for seemingly greener pastures.This move turned into the biggest mistake any member of academia could ever make. As soon as Newt became speaker, vitriolic congressional Democrats quickly targeted all things Newt. My mother was no exception. Barney Frank and Charles Schumer pulled a partial quote from a confidential (never believe anything is confidential with the government) review she had written on a volunteer basis for the Department of Education 10 years prior about a program aimed at teaching the Holocaust to seventh-grade children....
Source: Grand Forks Herald
1-30-12
Playford V. Thorson II could come off stern in a classroom, for he had high standards and expected students to meet them. He could be gruff, especially when confronted by pomposity, whether a freshman’s or a college dean’s.But he could be charmingly whimsical and engaging, as well, former students and colleagues remember, often stopping in the middle of a lecture as if just then discovering the meaning of some event in the distant past. He delighted in the serendipity of learning.Thorson, a UND history professor for 35 years who specialized in Scandinavian and immigrant studies as well as the broad sweep of modern European history, died Thursday in Grand Forks. He was 86.“He knew books and he brought students’ attention to books, how important they were and how to interpret them,” said Gordon Iseminger, who joined UND’s history faculty in 1962, two years after his colleague....
Source: DNA
1-23-12
One of Pakistan's most acclaimed historians, Ayesha Jalal bemoans the fact that history as an academic discipline has failed to grow in her country, a deficiency that needs to be addressed to spawn a new breed of scholars in the subject.A professor of History at the Tufts University with as many as seven books to her credit, the Pakistani-American who is an authority on South Asia has chosen to return to Pakistan as a visiting scholar to help address the gap in her own way.In India to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival, Jalal told PTI during an interaction why she felt that the academic growth of history in India had contributed to the development of a worthy scholarship in this country....
Source: BBC News
1-23-12
Novelist Jeffrey Eugenides and the late historian Manning Marable are among the nominees for the US National Book Critics Circle awards.Eugenides is nominated for The Marriage Plot, the tale of three students caught in a love triangle, which opens on the day of their graduation.Marable, meanwhile, is shortlisted in the biography category for his revelatory history of Malcolm X.The winners will be announced on 8 March. No cash prize is given....
Source: WaPo
1-23-12
Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich likes to use the word “elites” as a pejorative when he talks about things and people whom he considers liberal. But the former House speaker himself is in pretty elite company when it comes to his PhD.For one thing, earning a doctorate is a pretty elite thing to do in the United States. Nearly 40 percent of Americans ages 25 and older had an associate and/or bachelor's degree in 2010, according to the Census Bureau, while less than 3 percent had a doctorate.Only one American president in the entire history of the country has had a doctorate, Woodrow Wilson, who served from 1913 to 1921, and earned a PhD in history and political science from Johns Hopkins University. His doctorate was called “Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics.” (Wilson was also president of Princeton University.)...
Source: Ian Pryde in Russia Beyond the Headlines
1-24-12
Ian Pryde is founder and C.E.O. of Eurasia Strategy & Communications in Moscow....Niall Ferguson, for instance, the noted presenter and pundit, said last week on Bloomberg TV, where he is a contributing editor, that Romney’s experience with start-ups and turnarounds was exactly what American needed.As a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School with conservative leanings, Ferguson might be expected to say that, but in his other capacity as professor of history at Harvard, he really ought to know better. Business education or success hardly guarantees success in politics: Running a country requires far broader skills than managing a business.
Source: Public Radio International
1-24-12
...The address begins at 9 p.m. eastern (8 central) and will be carried on all the major broadcast networks and cable news channels. About half of Americans are expected to watch the address.Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, said the president realizes this is his opportunity to lay out the case for why he deserves to be re-elected."To contrast with what his opponents are saying in their primaries and caucuses," Zelizer said.And it can have a major impact. Zelizer said Ronald Reagan's 1984 address won a landmark, with huge impact on his re-election."Reagan had spent the first four years being very bellicose, and using aggressive language against the Soviet Union," Zelizer said. "By 1983 and 1984, he's mellowed. He's worried about the potential for nuclear war with the Soviets, and his advisers were telling him you have to show you're genuinely interested in peace, or you're going to scare away voters."...
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-22-12
Built 20 miles north of Saigon, Long Binh Post was the largest U.S. base in Vietnam. Among its features was the Nature of the War Museum, a replica of a Viet Cong-controlled village complete with tunnels, booby traps, and weapons. It served "as a reminder to personnel that there was indeed a war going on somewhere nearby," writes Meredith H. Lair.That was not always easy to remember, she suggests, in Long Binh, a Cleveland-size enclave of American opulence that rarely saw any danger. The joke was that if the Viet Cong ever really attacked the base, with its 180 miles of roads, they would have to use the scheduled bus system for the incursion.The huge base is emblematic of Lair's fluid and engrossing new book, Armed With Abundance: Consumerism and Soldiering in the Vietnam War (University of North Carolina Press).The typical experience of the American soldier in Vietnam was not "the infantryman humping the boonies on ambush patrol that Platoon and other popular treatments have enshrined in public memory," says the author, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University. While 2.5 million Americans served in Vietnam, a much smaller portion saw combat....
