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: Boston Globe
6-3-09
Harvard University will announce tomorrow that it will establish an endowed chair in lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender studies, in what is believed to be the first professorship of its kind in the country.
Harvard President Drew G. Faust described the academic post as “an important milestone” in an ongoing effort by faculty, students, and alumni to raise the profile of LGBT studies at the university.
The university has received a $1.5 million gift from the Harvard
Source: Jerry Haber at The Magnes Zionist (blog)
6-2-09
Well, I am going to go out on a limb. If there is one book that has come out recently on the history of Israel and Zionism that you should read, then David N. Myers' book on Simon Rawidowicz is the one.
Myers's book contains the translation of a chapter that Rawidowicz wrote for, and then suppressed from, his great work on Jewish nationalism, Bavel vi-Yrus
Source: Thomas C. Reeves in an email to HNN
6-2-09
[Prof. Reeves writes from Wisconsin. Among his dozen books are Twentieth Century America: A Brief History, and biographies of John F. Kennedy, Joseph R. McCarthy, Fulton Sheen, and Chester A. Arthur. Marquette University Press published his biography of Wisconsin Governor Walter J. Kohler, Jr. in 2006.]
In the early 1880s a Democratic Party lawyer wrote a book attempting
to prove that President Chester A. Arthur had been born in Canada
and was thus constitutionally barred from being the
Source: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk
5-29-09
A dire warning that the Republic is a prime candidate to go bust has come from one of the world's leading economic historians.
"The idea that countries don't go bust is a joke," said Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor and author of The Ascent of Money.
"The debt trap may be about to spring" he said, "for countries that have created large stimulus packages in order to stimulate their economies."
His chosen prime candidate to go b
Source: KC Johnson quoted by Stuart Taylor at the National Journal website
6-2-09
... The thesis is quite good. I'm not sure it's a summa cum laude thesis... but summa grades essentially depend on the competition and the standards at the time.
As for the thesis as a whole, from a historian's perspective: It's solidly researched and fairly well written -- uses lots of data, more or less presents an argument, and has a pedagogical approach (political/economic history, focus on a key political leader in Muñoz Marin) that is very much mainstream. This is basi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed blog
6-5-09
As assistant editor of the Papers of Andrew Jackson, Tom Coens spends a lot of time reading Old Hickory's mail.
So this spring, when he saw a Web site offering an 1824 letter from the seventh president for $35,000, Mr. Coens recognized it immediately as belonging to a collection at the New York State Library, in Albany.
"I was familiar with how the letter physically looked," says Mr. Coens, an assistant research professor of history at the University of Tennes
Source: http://medievalnews.blogspot.com
6-1-09
Olivia Remie Constable, Professor of History, has been appointed to a five-year term as the Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Professor Constable has been serving as the acting Director of the Medieval Institute since July 2008, while continuing her work on the economic, social, and urban history of the medieval Mediterranean world, especially contacts among Muslims, Christians, and Jews in this region.
We interviewed Professor Cons
Source: Guardian (UK)
5-25-09
The Australian historian Patricia Crawford, who has died aged 68, was a feminist pioneer. In 1980, when she started writing about 17th-century women, there was almost nothing in print on the subject. Today there is barely any aspect of ordinary women's lives in this extraordinary period that has not been written about; and in very many cases, the groundwork was done by Crawford. It was customary, until recently, for historians to lament the dearth of sources for the history of women in an era wh
Source: Guardian (UK)
5-27-09
Next year the Royal Society will be celebrating its 350th anniversary. We owe much of our understanding of this body and its working to the historian Rupert Hall, who has died aged 88, and his wife Marie Boas Hall.
In 1949, Herbert Butterfield, in The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800, summoned historians to take seriously a development he considered at least as important as the Renaissance and Reformation. Hall took up the challenge in his book The Scientific Revolution, 1500-18
Source: Jonathan Schanze at the websites of American Thinker and Campus Watch
5-31-09
[Jonathan Schanzer, an adjunct scholar at Campus Watch, is deputy executive director for the Jewish Policy Center, and author of Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine (Palgrave, Nov 2008).]
A California nonprofit dedicated to"teaching about Islam & Muslims" at U.S. high schools and college campuses features a board of advisors that is stacked with some of the most controversial activist professors in the field of Middle Eastern studies today. The imprimatur of these scholars may
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-30-09
Historians enjoy the most active sex lives according to a survey of students at Oxford University.
The survey of more than 850 students by Oxford University student newspaper Cherwell also revealed that students who do not have sex more than once a month are most likely to get a first in their degree.
But students who claimed to have a more active sex life are more likely to attain a 2:1 or 2:2 in their degree.
Historians were found to claim to be more s
Source: Felix Salmon at his Reuters blog
5-28-09
In the blogosphere, 2=trend, and recently two high-profile financial journalists — Alan Beattie of the FT and Justin Fox of Time — have come out with heavyweight new books of economic history. Beattie’s False Economy looks at global development, while Fox’s
Source: NYT
5-30-09
Franklin H. Littell, a father of Holocaust studies who traced his engagement with the subject to the revulsion he felt as a young Methodist minister while witnessing a big Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1939, died last Saturday at his home in Merion Station, Pa., outside Philadelphia. He was 91.
His wife, Marcia Sachs Littell, announced the death.
Dr. Littell (pronounced lih-TELL), the author of more than two dozen scholarly books and a thousand articles, was among the firs
Source: Asian Week
5-27-09
It is with great sadness to announce that Professor Emeritus Ronald Takaki passed away on the evening of May 26th, 2009. He is survived by his wife, Carol Takaki, his three children Dana, Troy, and Todd Takaki, and his grandchildren.
Ron Takaki was one of the most preeminent scholars of our nation’s diversity, and considered “the father” of multicultural studies. As an academic, historian, ethnographer and author, his work helped dispel stereotypes of Asian Americans. In his study o
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
5-29-09
Him Mark Lai, a noted historian of the Chinese American experience, died at his San Francisco home on May 21 after suffering from cancer and its complications. He was 84.
Mr. Lai was an expert on the history of Chinese and Chinese Americans from the time of the first Asian settlement in California just before the Gold Rush to the present day. He wrote and edited 10 books and more than 100 scholarly articles on Chinese American life - a field that was mostly ignored by non-Asian hist
Source: http://greatergreaterwashington.org
5-28-09
DC needs an architectural historian to serve on the Historic Preservation Review Board. John Vlach's term has expired, and while he's offered to remain on the board, Mayor Fenty nominated someone else, Christopher Landis, to replace Vlach. However, while he has architectural training who works on historic buildings, Landis is not an architectural historian. And that's a problem.
At last week's confirmation hearing for Landis, DCPL's Rebecca Miller pointed out that National Park Serv
Source: NYT
5-28-09
Julie Coryell, who wrote a seminal history of jazz-rock fusion and while married to the guitarist Larry Coryell, managed his career and contributed to his recordings, died on May 10 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. She was 61 and lived in Hyde Park, N.Y.
The cause was undetermined, said her son Murali.
Ms. Coryell’s book, “Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, the Music,” first published in 1978, was one of the earliest serious histories of fusion. It contained interviews with 58 musician
Source: Mother Jones
5-29-09
Feature film director Chris Eyre has been giving a voice to contemporary Native American people ever since his 1998 indie hit Smoke Signals. Director Ric Burns has built his career on documentary films about innovators like Andy Warhol and Ansel Adams.
The two filmmakers recently teamed up to create We Shall Remain, a five-part PBS documentary that traces Native American history from the Mayflower through the 1970s. Mother Jones spoke with the two directors about Martin Scorsese, th
Source: CNSnews.com
5-31-09
At the close of the American Revolution in 1783, Gen. George Washington composed a circular letter to the governors of all the states urging them to imitate “that Charity, humility and pacific temper of mind, which were the Characteristicks of the Divine Author of our blessed Religion.”
He was, in fact, asking the governors of the nascent United States to imitate Jesus Christ. Indeed, Washington told the governors that if Americans failed to imitate Christ’s “example in these thin
Source: Rosenberg Archive (Wilson Center)
5-28-09
The release of notes taken in the KGB archives by Alexander Vassiliev makes it possible for the first time to draw a nearly complete picture of the recruitment, operations and exposure of the Rosenberg espionage ring. The Vassiliev notes reveal that the Rosenberg ring was more deeply involved in atomic espionage than prosecutors or investigators had suspected, and that several individuals who were previously believed to be only peripherally involved supplied the USSR with valuable military techn
