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: NYT (click here to watch video)
4-10-09
The historian David McCullough calls for a halt to construction plans near the Brooklyn Bridge, which he says would obscure the monument and damage a forgotten historical site nearby.
Source: Perspectives (AHA mag.)
4-1-09
Over the past year the American public has come dangerously close to losing the battle for a full and honest historical record of our foreign relations. Bureaucratic mismanagement within the State Department’s Office of the Historian threatened—and continues to threaten—to damage severely the documentary series, The Foreign Relations of the United States, which has been in continuous publication since 1861 and is considered the gold standard for diplomatic documentation (for a brief early discus
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandbox
4-12-09
In August 2006, I wrote a post entitled "Massad mystery at Harvard." There I asked why, for two years, Joseph Massad described his book Desiring Arabs as "forthcoming from Harvard University Press," only to announce that it would be published by the University of Chicago Press. I wrote the following:
Source: NY Daily News Editorial: "Bullying Columbia professor does not deserve lifetime employment"
4-13-09
There is a deeply disturbing report that Columbia University has granted tenure to a teacher who used his classroom as a platform for propagating offensive teachings about Jews - and bullied his students to boot.
Joseph Massad should have no place on the faculty of a world-class institution of higher learning, let alone a university located in New York. He showed himself to lack the quality of mind and temperament necessary to serve among the Columbia professoriate.
Mas
Source: http://www.press.uchicago.edu
4-13-09
[Rémi Brague is the author of the book, The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (University of Chicago Press, 2009).]
Question: As a historian of medieval Christian, Jewish, and Muslim thought, how do you view the relationship between the three religions of the book and philosophical activity? In particular, do you think there is a difference between theology and philosophy in Christianity, and between Kalām and
Source: UPI
4-11-09
Art historian David W. Scott, the founding director for the National Museum of American Art in Washington, reportedly has died at the age of 92.
Scott joined the museum in 1963 when it was known as the National Collection of Fine Arts and helped raise the Smithsonian Institute site's stature, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.
"Scott determined to build the NCFA into a museum of consequence," author Sophy Burnham said in her "The Art Crowd" boo
Source: Press Release--Emory University
4-7-09
Holocaust Denial on Trial (HDOT.org), a Web site founded by Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt to teach about the dangers of Holocaust denial and demonstrate how deniers distort historical evidence of the Holocaust, is re-launching in four new languages: Arabic, Farsi, Russian and Turkish. These translations are designed to spread the original site's messages to areas where Holocaust denial goes the most unchallenged.
HDOT.org was founded following the well-known David Irvi
Source: http://www.cibmagazine.com
4-1-09
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s ambitious new work, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments presents a chronicle of Shanghai’s interactions with the outside world through a series of 25-year snapshots in time.
CIB caught up with the University of California-Irvine professor at the Shanghai Literary Festival last month to discover more about his methodology and hear his views on the past, present and future of China’s largest city.
When did you start researching the bo
Source: Kimberly Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan in the WSJ
4-9-09
... On a visit to Iraq last month, we had the opportunity to see the transformation firsthand. Iraq is now a fully sovereign country. U.S. Commander Gen. Ray Odierno has insisted on the most rigorous implementation of the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, which gives Iraqi authorities greater responsibility than ever before. U.S. forces now detain Iraqis only after securing arrest warrants from Iraqi judges, and they are releasing or transferring to Iraqi custody all of the detainees they now hold.
Source: USA Today
4-7-09
Barack Obama "is our first global president," according to historian Douglas Brinkley.
"Obama came of age, really, after the Cold War, with the Internet being the transformative engine of society, and he now takes his multicultural heritage and the geographical diversity of his upbringing" to the world, Brinkley said in an interview Tuesday as Obama wrapped up his first trip abroad.
Brinkley, who has written about presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald
Source: http://www.folioweekly.com
3-31-09
David Nolan has the perfect disguise. A white, middle-
aged man, dressed in dark slacks and a buttondown
shirt — his unvarying uniform — he moves
at an unhurried, deliberate pace. His speech is modulated
and good-natured, even when discussing the boneheaded
decision of some former official or the brutal repression
that once defined race relations in historic St. Augustine.
It’s a demeanor more neighborhood hardware salesman
than revolutionary, a camouflage that has served him
well.
Source: CNN
4-7-09
Hold on to the audacity of hope but shun the arrogance of over-promising.
That's the message from a scholar who says President Obama can learn much from the success and mistakes of another ambitious attempt to remake America.
Robert Weisbrot, co-author of "The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s,'' says the Great Society revolution was "tremendously liberating" for members of the most vulnerable groups in America.
Source: St. Petersburg Times -- politifact.com
4-5-09
In August 1963, when Raymond Arsenault was 15, his family was staying in a hotel during a move to Florida. • At the swimming pool, young Arsenault met some people who were on the way to what they told the teen would be a historic event the next day: the March on Washington for civil rights.
He was fired with the desire to witness it himself. "I told my family, 'We can't drive to Florida tomorrow,' " Arsenault says. "In the Hollywood version, we wouldn't have."
Source: Free Press
4-6-09
Michigan has thousands of university professors who are erudite scholars with impressive credentials, big ideas and, in many cases, decent contracts for books or consulting. Yet almost none of them ever penetrate public consciousness and become well known outside of academia.
One prof who came close to becoming a public personality was Sidney Fine, the University of Michigan history professor who died last Tuesday in Ann Arbor. He was 88.
Fine was famous for several rea
Source: CBCNews
4-6-09
J.M.S. Careless, the Canadian historian who wrote seminal works on George Brown, urban history and a changing Canada, has died. He was 90.
Careless died Monday at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital, according to his son, James Careless.
Careless won two Governor-General's Awards for his books of history — one for Brown of the Globe, a two-volume portrait of one of the Fathers of Confederation, and Canada: A Story of Challenge, which became a standard one-volume history of Ca
Source: WaPo
4-7-09
Steven Lee Carson, 66, a former archivist and editor who became a historian and lecturer on presidential history, notably as an authority on the life of President Abraham Lincoln, died March 27 at his home in Silver Spring after a heart attack.
During the past few years, he was a presidential historian at the Woodrow Wilson House. He spent his early career at the National Archives as well as writing for and editing the Manuscript Society News and other publications aimed at libraria
12-31-69
HNN readers are encouraged to post their memories on the discussion board below. No registration is required.Tributes
NYT edi
Source: David Levering Lewis in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
4-10-09
In"A Life of Learning," an address to the American Council of Learned Societies 20 years ago, John Hope Franklin recalled the 100th-birthday wisdom of the ragtime composer Eubie Blake, who said that had he known he would live so long,"I'd have taken better care of myself." John Hope Franklin not only took good care of himself until his death last month at 94, but he also took great care of the memory and self-concept of the American people.
A cautionary truth about the life of John Hope F
Source: NYT
4-5-09
Last Thursday, a jury in Denver ruled that the termination of activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado had been wrongful (a term of art) even though a committee of his faculty peers had found him guilty of a variety of sins.
The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the handling of evidence. The accusations that
Source: Steve Plaut in Middle East Quarterly, Spring, 2009 (the version above is longer)
4-5-09
[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.]
Ilan Pappe is probably the most widely known Israeli seeking the annihilation of his own country. He currently on the faculty of the University
