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: AHA Today
1-28-11
Historian Robert GriffithRobert Griffith, of American University, died on January 25, 2011. A gifted administrator and scholar, he served the American Historical Association as co-moderator of the department chairs’ listserv and as chair of the Local Arrangements Committee for the 2004 Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. The Organization of American Historians awarded him the Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions as treasurer from 2008–10.
Source: Business Insider
1-31-11
This revolution in Egypt is more likely to result in something like Iran, than it is to be like the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, according to Niall Ferguson.
Speaking to the German daily Handesblatt, Ferguson says that because the forces for democracy in Egypt are not well organized, Islamic fundamentalism will have a chance at success....
Source: Salon
1-29-11
Much of the media coverage of the protests in Egypt has noted that President Obama is in a tough position because the regime of Hosni Mubarak is an important ally of the United States.
So it's natural to ask: How and why did the United States become allies with Egypt in the first place? And how has the alliance, which includes an annual military aid package worth $1.3 billion, been sustained over the years?
To get some answers, I spoke with Joel Beinin, a Middle East hi
Source: WaPo
1-27-11
Jan. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Niall Ferguson, a history professor at Harvard University, discusses the outlook for emerging markets in Asia and the global economy. Ferguson, speaking with Bloomberg's Tom Keene at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, also talks about the sovereign debt crisis in Europe. (Source: Bloomberg) (Bloomberg)
Source: LJWorld.com
1-29-11
Topeka — During the prelude to the Civil War, Kansans fought on the side of what was right, seeking to keep the scourge of slavery out of the state and help the enslaved.
Wait a minute, historians say.
As Kansas celebrates its 150th birthday Saturday, those who have devoted their careers to studying the period want to fill people in on something: Most of the settlers who fought to ensure Kansas entered the union as a free state initially wanted to ban blacks from the st
Source: NYT
1-29-11
An amateur historian accused of forging the date on Abraham Lincoln’s pardon of a Union Army deserter has been permanently barred from the National Archives. His scheduled award next month from the New York Civil War Round Table has been rescinded. And the disclosure of the forgery has touched off a kerfuffle among Lincoln aficionados over whether the president was pardon-happy or a ruthless wartime commander.
Now it turns out that the forgery, which made the document appear to have
Source: al.com
1-29-11
HUNTSVILLE, AL -- "The archives are closed."
That's what author Diane McWhorter was initially told Thursday when she returned to the U.S. Space & Rocket Center archives to continue research for a book about Huntsville during the Saturn V/Apollo moon race years.
Irene Wilhite, longtime curator of the archives, and her assistant, her son Jamie, learned Thursday they are among 16 full-time Space Center employees being dropped from the payroll.
Th
Source: The Age (AU)
1-30-11
SOME seed must have been planted for Dale Blair to become a war historian, because he began his life's work as a child.
His father, in the navy at the time, had helped put together young Dale's first Airfix model, of the HMS Revenge. There were visits to the War Memorial in Canberra. Dale was like so many little boys who climbed on the Japanese submarine and wondered at the grimness of the dioramas with all the little men gathered shabbily on broken, fire-lit ground.
Th
Source: SPLC
1-29-11
The last time we met Jacques Pluss, a former history professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University who was fired after his ties to neo-Nazism surfaced in 2005, he was in the midst of a serious identity crisis. One minute, he was an avowed white supremacist proudly standing behind his statements, only to claim in the next that he was an academic sleuth infiltrating the world of racists.
That debate was apparently settled this week when the New Jersey State Police arrested Pluss, 57, on
Source: Time
1-27-11
In May 2010, Barack Obama invited a small group of presidential historians to the White House for a working supper in the Family Dining Room. It was the second time he'd had the group in since taking office, and as he sat down across the table from his wife Michelle, the President pressed his guests for lessons from his predecessors. But as the conversation progressed, it became clear to several in the room that Obama seemed less interested in talking about Lincoln's team of rivals or Kennedy's
Source: MyFoxDC
1-25-11
WASHINGTON - It was seen as one of President Abraham Lincoln's last official acts before he was assassinated. The date of a pardon for a civil war union solider is being called into question.
Federal officials believe the date on the document was changed to reflect the pardon was signed before Lincoln was murdered at Ford's theater.
The Archives said Monday that historian Thomas P. Lowry, 78, of Woodbridge, has acknowledged that he used a fountain pen with special ink t
Source: National Journal
1-25-11
It’s an appeal as old as America and its presidency: This is an extraordinary country populated by hard-working, big-dreaming, freedom-loving people graced by God when they’re not pulling themselves up by the bootstraps.
And I’m the guy to lead it.
Declaring in his State of the Union address that the United States is “a light to the world,” President Obama joined the pantheon of presidents who, in turbulent times, wrapped their political agenda in the comfortable cloak
Source: NYT
1-26-11
Encyclopedic in breadth but compact enough for the vest pocket of a 19th-century gentleman on the go, the book was an insider’s guide to Manhattan, easily picked up at the newsstand before a night on the town, much the way tourists and local residents now consult a guidebook when they are in the mood for a memorable restaurant or meal.
Only this palm-sized book, published in 1870 and long hidden away at the New-York Historical Society, did not confine its anonymous critique to the q
Source: CNN.com
1-26-11
(CNN) -- President Barack Obama delivered a 61-minute State of the Union address Tuesday with a new theme -- putting his emphasis on investing in making America's economy more competitive in a more challenging world.
"We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world," he said. Republicans, who took control of the House in the midterm elections, faulted the president for not focusing on cutting government spending to rein in deficits.
An
Source: Inside Higher Ed
1-25-11
In early February, scholars and university presidents from across the country will gather at Emory University for a conference on "Slavery and the University." For even as the United States marks the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, some of its battles continue to flare on campuses. Last year, for example, Eastern Illinois University rejected a faculty proposal to rename a dormitory that honors Stephen A. Douglas, who debated Lincoln and who many argued -- at that time and today -- d
Source: Voice of America
1-25-11
...Tunisia scholar Kenneth Perkins, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, says “it is true that Tunisia’s economy appeared to be prosperous, but while some people benefitted, many outside Tunis, in remote areas, did not see the results of Tunisia’s prosperity.”
Author of A History of Modern Tunisia, Tunisia: Crossroads of the Islamic and European Worlds and Historical Dictionary of Tunisia, Perkins says one example is students who completed university degrees but
Source: Parker Spitzer (CNN)
1-24-11
ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering our five OFF-SET questions is historian Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and a contributing editor at Vanity fair magazine.
Anne Brinkley
In his new book, “The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, 1879 – 1960,” Brinkley documents the battle to save the “wild Alaska” – Mount McKinley, the Tongass and Chugach National Forests, Glacier Bay, and the Coastal Plain of the Beaufort Sea, among other treasured areas—from
Source: Newsweek
1-24-11
If President Obama’s planned “call to unity” and pledge to work on centrist initiatives in his second State of the Union speech don’t have you itching to tune in Tuesday night, don’t feel too bad. Not many of your fellow citizens will watch, and even if they do, they’re unlikely to remember what it was they heard....
“They’re not defining moments for presidents,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. “There are a few times when the way events u
Source: NYT
1-24-11
Just hours before Abraham Lincoln “put on his hat and headed for Ford’s Theater,” on April 14, 1865, the president is said to have spared a mentally incompetent Army private the death penalty for desertion.
The legendary act of compassion was revealed by Thomas Lowry, an amateur historian, who said he found the pardon among hundreds of untapped Lincoln documents in the National Archives in 1998 and described it in a book the following year. His discovery was hailed by scholars as on
Source: NARA
1-24-11
Washington, DC…Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero announced today that Thomas Lowry, a long-time Lincoln researcher from Woodbridge, VA, confessed on January 12, 2011, to altering an Abraham Lincoln Presidential pardon that is part of the permanent records of the U.S. National Archives. The pardon was for Patrick Murphy, a Civil War soldier in the Union Army who was court-martialed for desertion.
Lowry admitted to changing the date of Murphy’s pardon, written in Lincol
