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: WaPo
5-29-09
Historian and author Annette Gordon-Reed has won a literary Triple Crown with her remarkable "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," her 798-page exploration of Thomas Jefferson and the family of slaves with whom he became intimately involved. The book has won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and, yesterday, the $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, given annually to the "most important new book about America's founding era."
For a decade, G
Source: Press Release--Washington College
5-29-09
MOUNT VERNON, Va. – The fifth annual $50,000 George Washington Book Prize, honoring the most important new book about America’s founding era, was awarded at Mount Vernon on May 28 to Annette Gordon-Reed for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (Norton, 2008). Gordon-Reed – author of the highly acclaimed Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, which offered convincing evidence for the existence of an intimate relationship between the Founder and
Source: Hugh Turley (Special to HNN)
5-29-09
[Hugh Turley writes for the The Hyattsville Life and Times .]
This month marked the 60th anniversary of the death of James V. Forrestal, America’s first secretary of defense. Historians were invited to comment on the official investigation of his death. The investigation is known as the Willcutts Report. In 2004 The History News Network announced the report was available on line at the Princeton Uni
Source: John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev at National Review Online
5-26-09
EDITOR’S NOTE: We now know more than ever before about Soviet intelligence operations in the United States, thanks to the efforts of John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev. Their just-published book, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, is based on material from the KGB archives in Moscow. It presents new evidence on the activities of Alger Hiss, I. F. Stone, and many others. In this exclusive NRO excerpt, they impart previously unknown information about author Ern
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed blog
5-28-09
The American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association have sent letters to Louisiana’s governor, Bobby Jindal, asking him to keep the Louisiana State University Press open. Louisiana’s budget is in deep trouble, and the press could be forced to shut down if it loses its operating subsidy in the current round of state budget cuts. The AHA’s and the MLA’s letters add the weight of two prominent scholarly associations to a growing public campaign of support for the press.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-27-09
Church leaders turned the Virgin Mary from being a "serious, official, imperial" figure into a normal "mum" to widen Christianity's appeal, according to a leading medieval historian.
Speaking at the Hay Festival in Wales, Mary Rubin, the author of Mother of God – A History of the Virgin Mary, said the transformation took place in the 11th and 12th century, with images of her knitting and cooking.
By comparison she was portrayed in the early church a
Source: U. of Penn. website (Click here to watch video.)
5-1-09
When Steven Hahn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History, visited the New York Historical Society’s exhibit, Slavery in New York, several years ago, he was surprised by how surprised visitors were to discover New York’s long involvement with slavery. “Most were simply stunned,” he recounts in his new book, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. They never knew how deeply embedded slavery was in the North and that it remained a national—not just Southern—instituti
Source: Washington & Lee website
5-25-09
Joan O’Mara, associate professor of art history at Washington and Lee, died Sunday, May 24, 2009. She was 63.
The wake will be held at Harrison’s Funeral Home in Lexington, on Wednesday, May 27, from 5 to 7 p.m.. The Mass of Christian Burial will take place at St. Patrick’s Church at 11 a.m. on Thursday, May 28. Burial will take place at a later date in the Mausoleum of Our Lady of Sorrows on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. Contributions in O'Mara's memory may be made
Source: Joshua Treviño in the The New Nixon blog
5-26-09
[Joshua Treviño is the president of Trevino Strategies and Media, Inc., in Sacramento, California. He served as a U.S. Army officer, worked in the Administration of George W. Bush from 2001 through 2004, and at the Pacific Research Institute from 2005 through 2008.]
Simon Schama is a great scholar, a great writer, and a great historian. Among his many works, The Embarrassment of Riches is the finest history of the Dutch Golden Age in English; and Citizens is among the be
Source: Terrence Cheng in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
5-29-09
[Terrence Cheng is the incoming chairman of the English department at Lehman College of the City University of New York. He is author of two novels, including Sons of Heaven (William Morrow, 2002), which is set during the Tiananmen Square massacre and fictionalizes the lives of Deng Xiaoping and the man who faced the tanks. ]
On June 4, 1989, the Chinese military, under orders from the highest levels of government, violently crushed peaceful civilian demonstrations in Beijing, most
Source: Mormon Times
5-23-09
Ronald W. Walker, Richard E. Turley and Glen M. Leonard received the honor at the association's awards banquet on (Friday) May 22, for their book "Massacre at Mountain Meadows," published last year by Oxford University Press. The book has been heralded as the most thorough treatment to date of the 1857 event in which a wagon train of Arkansas emigrants traveling through southern Utah en route to California were killed by Mormon militia men agitated by the approach of a U.S. Army force
Source: http://www.thelocal.de
5-24-09
In comments published in Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Sunday, renowned historian Tom Segev said Germany had drawn the right lessons from its past and had reason to celebrate on its 60th anniversary.
Segev wrote that democracy is a key component of the collective identity of Germans today.
“The most important reason for the success of democracy is that the majority of Germans – though not always voluntarily – took responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi regime, the war
Source: http://www.examiner.com
5-24-09
New York State requires that every town have a town historian. This is great news for genealogists as town historians are responsible for preserving the past. This may include town documents, buildings and artifacts. They may be instrumental in helping the town store historical items so that they may be preserved for posterity.
Although, town historians exist, they are often hard to find. Due to budget constraints, they may not have an office or website. They may even be in a town that do
Source: WaPo
5-25-09
Perez Zagorin, 88, a leading historian of the 17th-century English Revolution and a critic of Marxist interpretations of history, died April 26 at George Washington University Hospital of complications following open-heart surgery. He lived in Washington.
Since 1992, Dr. Zagorin had been a research fellow at the University of Virginia's Edgar F. Shannon Center for Advanced Studies. He established his reputation as a prominent scholar in 1954 with "A History of Political Thought
Source: NYT Book Review
5-20-09
... [Benny] Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University in Israel, argues [in his new book, “One State, Two States” ] that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state comprised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.
Morris is equally dismissive of those who believe that a so-called one-state solution might work in place of a two-state solution. Muslim anti-Semitism and the deep cultur
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
5-25-09
To the Editor:
Re “ On Fiery Birth of Israel, Memories of 2 Sides Speak” (Tel Aviv Journal, May 18):
Those who criticize the current oral history projects (and other such projects) because of the fallibility of individual memory miss the point. It is precisely the differences among retrospective accounts, and how they do and do not agree with otherwise documented history, that make them most useful.
People live within the pasts they construct and, to whatev
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-24-09
The Allied bombing of the French city of Caen on D-Day was "close to a war crime", according to leading historian Antony Beevor.
Ahead of the 65th anniversary of the invasion of France in the Second World War next month, Professor Beevor claimed that an assumption the city had been evacuated had been "wishful thinking on the part of the British".
He said numerous mistakes were made by the Allies in the immediate aftermath of the invasion, and also pr
Source: David Chambers in the Washington Times
5-22-09
Susan Jacoby is a gifted writer. She is deft and light. As a grandchild of Whittaker Chambers (who was another gifted writer, if rarely so light), I looked forward to "Alger Hiss and the Battle for History." How would she weigh in on the Hiss case?
Her latest book begins with a clever foil. She has her own mother ask of this book about the Hiss case, "Who cares about that anymore?" We should, Ms. Jacoby holds. People today need to avoid the "swift eclipses o
Source: National Law Journal
5-18-09
Is New York Law School's Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize-winning law professor/historian, on President Obama's Supreme Court "short list"? Or, Alabama lawyer Bryan Stevenson, a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award recipient and tireless advocate on behalf of indigent defendants and prisoners? How about veteran consumer rights champion Alan Morrison and University of Notre Dame Law School Dean Patricia O'Hara?
Probably not. But they appear on the short list
Source: History Today
11-14-08
New research by University College London has revealed that massive amounts of government compensation were paid out to investors when slavery was abolished in the 19th century. Dr Nick Draper has discovered that £20 million worth of payments were made, a figure that equates to a staggering 40% of government expenditure of the day.Even more surprising are the backgrounds to the recipients. The image many today wou
