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: Greg Mitchell at The Nation
7-8-10
[Greg Mitchell is the former editor of Editor & Publisher and author of nine books, including "So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq;" "Why Obama Won"; "The Campaign of the Century"; "Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady"; and (with Robert Jay Lifton) "Hiroshima in America" and "Who Owns Death?"]
With each passing month, it seems, Andrew Bacevich gains more fans and influence--and
Source: WaPo
7-8-10
Some or all of the 10 accused Russian spies are expected to plead guilty at a hearing in Manhattan Thursday afternoon, according to sources familiar with the case. One source said all of the defendants have agreed to enter guilty pleas and could be sent to Russia as early as Thursday as part of a prisoner exchange involving a prominent Russian scientist, and possibly others, held in Russia on charges of spying for the West.
Jeffrey Burds, associate professor of Russian and Soviet hi
Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
7-8-10
Faced with its own money troubles, the University of Minnesota is turning away more graduate students who would get financial help such as teaching positions. Still welcome are those who pay their own way or pursue in-demand studies such as biomedical sciences....
Graduate education "is what makes this a research university," said Prof. Jeffrey Pilcher, director of graduate studies for the Department of History. "It reflects on the quality of the faculty and is crucia
Source: Salon
7-7-10
[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush."]
Before the inquiring minds at the Aspen Ideas Festival go totally gaga over Niall Ferguson, perhaps they ought to know a little more about the British historian's keen desire to punish our pampered working families, and how he would prefer to see us spend our dollars.
As a celebrity intellectual, Ferguson much
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
7-7-10
Lawrence Harris, who had careers as an American diplomat, an army officer and a college professor, visited 52 countries and every continent.
But the Roswell resident always returned to his roots. He was the son of Southern Baptist missionaries, raised in China during the 1920s and ’30s.
That background gave him a lifelong affection for Asia – his wife, Thelma Harris, is from the Philippines – a commitment to God and respect for the Baptist faith, said his family and fri
Source: El Paso Times
7-6-10
As far as historian David Romo is concerned, the streets of South El Paso represent a living textbook that can help students understand the complexities of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.
"The role of El Paso in the revolution by any criteria should be part of not only the El Paso school curriculum but the national curriculum," Romo said. "Unfortunately, it's mostly ignored by the textbooks."
Romo, author of the book "Ringside Seat to a Revolut
Source: NYT
7-6-10
Ann Waldron, who wrote biographies of Southern writers and books for children and young adults, but then — at 78 — decided that she’d rather concoct tales about gruesome murders on the campus of Princeton University, died Friday at her home in Princeton, N.J. She was 85.
The cause was heart failure, her son Tom said.
A daughter of the South, Ms. Waldron wrote three biographies about Southern writers and editors. One, “Hodding Carter: The Reconstruction of a Racist” — ab
Source: USA Today
7-6-10
As hundreds of thousands of workers knock on doors this summer to collect information for the 2010 Census, momentum is mounting to drag future Censuses into the 21st century....
"Using the Postal Service was an enormous innovation in 1970" when Census forms were first mailed (previous Censuses were door-to-door surveys), says Margo Anderson, a professor of history and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an expert on Census history. "We're 40 yea
Source: Aspen Daily News
7-6-10
Harvard professor and prolific author Niall Ferguson opened the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival Monday with a stark warning about the increasing prospect of the American “empire” suddenly collapsing due to the country’s rising debt level.
“I think this is a problem that is going to go live really soon,” Ferguson said. “In that sense, I mean within the next two years. Because the whole thing, fiscally and other ways, is very near the edge of chaos. And we’ve seen already in Greece what hap
Source: WaPo
7-6-10
Historians do not do breaking news. Historians do not do the latest scandal scoops, election-night projections, or instant updates of Washington's winners and losers. So it is no surprise that the media's demand for historians is scant. But every now and then, when the breaking political news from Capitol Hill is in dire need of historical context, journalists and politicians alike go looking for Fred Beuttler.
In May 2006, as news unfolded about the controversy over an FBI raid on
Source: NYT
7-5-10
...The unassuming date could also merit respect for providing a pair of tidy bookends in the United States labor movement. In 1934, police officers in San Francisco opened fire on striking longshoreman in one of the country’s most significant and violent labor clashes. On the same date a year later, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing the rights of employees to organize and to bargain collectively with their employers.
“That’s a big
Source: NYT
7-5-10
For a 14th straight year, James S. Kaplan spent the Fourth of July walking in the middle of the night among ghosts of the American Revolution....
Mr. Kaplan, a tax and estate lawyer for whom history is an avocation, feels that the general has been slighted for far too long. This goes beyond the unmarked grave. Historians today are more likely to give Benedict Arnold — yes, that Benedict Arnold, before he became synonymous with treason — the credit for victory at Saratoga.
Source: CHE
7-4-10
Some time this fall, the U.S. Education Department will publish a report that documents the death of tenure.
Innocuously titled "Employees in Postsecondary Institutions, Fall 2009," the report won't say it's about the demise of tenure. But that's what it will show.
Over just three decades, the proportion of college instructors who are tenured or on the tenure track plummeted: from 57 percent in 1975 to 31 percent in 2007....
Source: NJ.com
7-5-10
Princeton University historian John Haldon, a leading authority on medieval Byzantine history, can't really remember a time when history didn't intrigue him....
These days, Haldon is a professor of Byzantine history and Hellenic studies at Princeton....
...[O]ne of the ambitious enterprises in which he is currently engaged, which began four years ago, is the Euchaita/Avkat Project in Turkey, near the current-day village of Beyozu....
One of the project's un
Source: NYT
7-5-10
Sedick Isaacs approached the infamous and windswept prison here, now closed, and pounded the door knock. His first trip here, on Dec. 1, 1964, had not been so voluntary or droll. He was bound in chains at the time and dumped out of the back of a truck, not to leave for 13 years.
“When you got here, you were no longer a person, you were a thing,” Isaacs said.
One way that political prisoners maintained their humanity during the apartheid years in this notorious place wa
Source: AScribe.org
7-1-10
Soviet photojournalists working for the country's most important newspapers were among the first to document the unfolding Holocaust in their homeland, and they were also witnessing and recording the slaughter of Soviet citizens who, like the photographers themselves, were Jewish.
But the extent to which the Nazis targeted Jews was obscured in the dominant Soviet press during World War II and was suppressed in the Cold War era, during which the Soviets dwelled on the depravi
Source: Middle East Forum
7-1-10
The Middle East Forum is pleased to announce that Efraim Karsh, the distinguished historian, will become editor of the Middle East Quarterly starting with the Fall 2010 issue.
Mr. Karsh has taught at King's College London since 1989, where he has just ended a sixteen-year stint as founding director of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program and is now a research professor.
Previously, Mr. Karsh held various academic posts at Columbia University, the Sorbonne,
Source: U.S. News & World Report
7-1-10
Ten years before President Ronald Reagan stood in Berlin to demand,"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" communism's demise was in no way assured. Decades of proxy wars saw communist and capitalist powers bargaining and competing for footholds around the world. British historian and former Oxford University professor
Source: NY Daily News
6-30-10
This grudge isn't history.
A runner-up for Queens borough historian has ripped into the eventual pick, Jack Eichenbaum, as "sadly misinformed" with a "profound ignorance" of efforts to save significant sites.
Author Jeffrey Kroessler posted the critical comments online in response to a recent Daily News article in which Eichenbaum said he'd rather be an educator than fight to landmark buildings.
"Sadly, Mr. Eichenbaum is poised to c
Source: Latin American Herald Tribune
6-30-10
U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday nominated Ambassador Larry Leon Palmer -- formerly the US Ambassador to Honduras -- as the new U.S. Ambassador to Venezuela....
Born in Augusta, Georgia in 1948, Palmer graduated from Emory University (B.A., 1970) and completed his graduate training at Texas Southern University (M.Ed., African History, 1973) and Indiana University Bloomington (Ed. D., Higher Education Administration and African Studies, 1978).
Prior to joining the F
