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: AFP
9-28-08
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday blamed an extreme right-wing group for an attack on an Israeli peace campaigner and warned that the country was facing an ill-wind of extremism.
"Police and interior security were given orders to do their utmost to arrest the culprits as soon as possible," he told journalists after historian Zeev Sternhell was wounded by a pipe bomb at his home in Jerusalem on Thursday.
"This appears to be the work of a clandestine g
Source: http://news.uky.edu
9-29-08
James Klotter, University of Kentucky alumnus and Kentucky State Historian, was honored Sept. 29 with the Outstanding Alumnus of Kentucky (OAK) Award. The recognition took place at a luncheon during the 2008 Governor’s Conference on Postsecondary Education Trusteeship in Lexington.
Following the keynote address by Governor Steve Beshear, the OAK and Acorn Awards were presented by Secretary of State Trey Grayson. The awards are sponsored by the Kentucky Advocates for Higher Education
Source: NYT
9-28-08
It was a Dickensian beginning, William Woodruff’s, to say the least. He was born on a heap of cotton in the mill where his parents worked and his grandfather died. Then, with a market crash in 1920, England’s mills themselves died.
His proud family sank into a poverty so profound that his grandmother starved to death rather than take welfare. His unemployed father sewed mailbags in a tiny kitchen — the same work inmates did in the local jail.
And Mr. Woodruff, who later
Source: NYT
9-28-08
Marc Raeff, a Russian émigré who came to the United States at 18, served in the United States Army during World War II and became one of the country’s leading scholars of Russian history, writing the first study of the Russian diaspora, died on Sept. 20 in Teaneck, N.J. He was 85....
HNN Editor: A reader of HNN, David McDonald, has sent along an email indicating that the Times obituary omitted important contributions made by Professor Raeff. Email from David McDonald
Source: Times (UK)
9-28-08
He was a mother’s boy, a precocious intellect, a dandy and a tyrant whose pursuit of fame was obsessive. Uncharitable souls might project these traits of Henry VIII onto David Starkey, the historian and broadcaster, who has poured a lifetime of research into a new study of the king that is being hailed as a triumph.
“This book is Starkey’s masterpiece,” says John Guy, the historian and Tudor scholar, of Henry: Virtuous Prince, to be published this week. “It combines the populist tou
Source: Simon Jenkins in the Times (UK)
9-28-08
“The most evil nation on earth!” At a dinner in Lahore earlier this year I was shocked at the casual anti-Americanism of the conversation. Sophisticated people who knew America and Americans well took it as second nature to excoriate the place. When I expressed surprise, I was told that America was polluting Pakistan’s culture, undermining its democracy and fomenting the Taliban by bombing Pashtun villages. Yes, I said, but could they not distinguish between the misdeeds of a particular presiden
Source: AP
9-27-08
A prominent death-penalty historian's records have been acquired by the University at Albany.
M. Walt Espy has been described by the New York Times as "America's foremost death penalty historian." The Alabama resident has devoted nearly four decades to documenting more than 15,000 executions in America, dating back to colonial Jamestown.
His work is considered a unique and invaluable contribution to the history of capital punishment in this country. It will be
Source: Star Ledger (NJ)
9-26-08
It was by his grandfather's side that 4-year-old Lonnie G. Bunch III first saw the pictures. The photographs of several children, perhaps from the 1800s, were in a book his grandfather picked to read with him before din ner. The faces staring back at him had no names, nothing to identify them. Young Lonnie was mesmerized. He wanted to know more about the kids, where they came from, how they lived, if they were happy.
This was his first brush with history, the impetus that put him on a pat
Source: NYT
9-26-08
Its operating budget deficit this year is $170 million. In May, it outraged tenants by threatening to shutter hundreds of community centers, senior centers and popular programs to cut costs. Three months later, a 5-year-old boy fell to his death at a Brooklyn complex after trying to escape from a stalled elevator, focusing the attention of the press and lawmakers on the agency’s elevator maintenance and oversight.
But at a small gathering on Thursday night at a [NYC] Housing Authori
Source: China Beat
9-26-08
Paul A. Cohen, professor of history emeritus at Wellesley College and also an associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center, has long been interested in not just what happened but also how historians tell the stories of the past. As one of the strongest advocates for China-centered historical work, Cohen has explored this tension between history and its telling in works that sometimes reveal unknown stories and sometimes confound the traditional tellings of well-known historical events. These earlier
Source: http://www.canada.com
9-24-08
Lithuanian prosecutors said Wednesday they are dropping a war crimes investigation of an Israeli Holocaust historian who served with Soviet forces in the Baltic state.
In a statement, the prosecutor's office cited a "failure to collect sufficient data grounding primary suspicions" as its reason for halting its investigation of Yitzhak Arad, 81, who worked with Soviet security forces in the wake of World War II.
"During the investigation, 83 persons were q
Source: Telegraph (UK)
9-24-08
William Woodruff, who died on Tuesday aged 92, enjoyed a late celebrity in his eighties when his gritty two-volume memoir, The Road to Nab End (2000) and Beyond Nab End (2003), became surprise bestsellers.
Woodruff was brought up in penury among the cotton mills of Blackburn, and eventually made his mark in America as an economic historian. While his blunt description of the indignity of working-class life in the pre-welfare era was a telling corrective for those who like to harp on about
Source: http://www.madison.com
9-24-08
A science historian at UW-Madison has been named interim director of the University's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Gregg Mitman, 47, is a professor of history of science, medical history, science and technology studies and environmental studies.
Provost Pat Farrell, who announced the two-year appointment Wednesday, said Mitman will help the Nelson Institute meet the goals of a new university-wide strategic plan while addressing the environmental challenge
Source: BBC News
9-25-08
A well-known Israeli critic of Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, Zeev Sternhell, has been slightly wounded in a bomb attack.
Police suspect ultra-nationalists Israelis were behind the attack.
Professor Sternhell has also strongly opposed the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, describing it as immoral and ineffective.
Earlier this year, Professor Sternhell was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for political science.
Mr Sternhell s
Source: http://www.thechadronnews.com
9-23-08
No region suffered more during the drought and Depression in the 1930s than the Northern Great Plains that includes the Dakotas and Nebraska, according to Dr. Rolland Dewing, a long-time history professor at Chadron State College who returned to the campus to speak Wednesday night.
Now a resident of Renton, Wash., Dewing said although some historians have stated the southwestern United States felt the brunt of the Dust Bowl days, his research indicates conditions were even worse in
Source: NYT
9-23-08
John E. Taylor, a specialist in military history at the National Archives for 63 years and a trusted guide to authors mining the dusty records of past wars, died Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 87.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his niece, Claudia Taylor Walsworth.
Mr. Taylor joined the archives staff in September 1945 at the close of World War II, whose intelligence records would become his particular interest. Despite declining health, he
Source: NYT
2-23-08
--John A. Ochsendorf, engineer and architectural historian who uses old technologies that go back to the Incas to improve today’s buildings.
--Nancy G. Siraisi, historian of medicine focusing on the Renaissance.
Source: Press Release
9-22-08
On October 1, 2008, ASHP/CML will launch our latest website, Picturing United States History: An Online Resource for Teaching with Visual Evidence. Representing a unique collaboration between historians and art historians, Picturing U.S. History is based on the belief that visual materials are vital to understanding the American past. Visitors to the new website will find Web-based guides, essays, case studies, classroom activities, and online forums to assist high school teachers and college in
Source: Newsletter of the American Revolution Round Table of New York
9-22-08
On October 7, the American Revolution Round Table of New York will celebrate its Fiftieth Anniversary. It is a day we hope all our members will join us in hailing with pride and pleasure. Fifty years is a long time for any American organization. It is nothing less than amazing for one like the AART, whose officers and committee heads are all volunteers. It is a tribute to the enduring fascination of our subject, the founding of the American republic, an enterprise that has changed the world. It
Source: NYT
9-19-08
When, 11 years ago, DNA evidence convinced most experts that Thomas
Jefferson had fathered children with his slave Sally Hemings, many
people talked about what the discovery said about Jefferson. Yet few
seemed all that interested in what it said about the young girl he
owned.
Annette Gordon-Reed was one of those few. Her 1997 book,"Thomas
Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy" (University of
Virginia Press), examined how historians throughout the decades
consisten
