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: Tim Naftali dissecting a new book at Slate.com
6-2-08
Dear Sean,
Congratulations on your excellent new political history of our times. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who first made his name with The Age of Jackson, would appreciate the homage implied in your title. And I suspect he might also agree—and I certainly do—that, like it or not, Reagan was the transcendent figure of fin-de-siecle politics in America.
Your first two chapters do a great job laying out the crisis of the old order. In the 1970s the entire American politica
Source: Anthony Grafton in the New Republic
6-11-08
History was born in Greece in the middle of the fifth century B.C.E. It has flourished ever since then, in diverse but recognizably related forms, and it still exists today, as a form of inquiry into the past, a literary genre, and a set of practices plied and taught in universities. That's our story, in the West, and we're sticking to it. Or at least John Burrow is. After a swift glance toward ancient ways of keeping records, Burrow begins his elegant and erudite book with a rich study of Herod
Source: Sean Wilentz in the course of an exchange with Ruy Teixeira and others at Salon.com
6-3-08
Race has primarily played a factor to help Barack Obama. Not only with the African-American vote, which is fairly clear, I mean it's obviously clear, but with some white voters as well. I think that the idea that Hillary Clinton has suddenly gained a lot of support from racists, which we call "low information" voters, things like that, is just a myth. I mean, in fact, if you look over the exit polls, she's done much better in the votes since March, in fact, most of that support can be
Source: George Mason University's Center for History and New Media
6-3-08
The Center for History and New Media is pleased to announce the launch of Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives http://gulaghistory.org, a new online resource exploring the history of the Soviet Gulag.The project is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities; Title VIII, The U.S. Department of State; Kennan Institute; and Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University; and was produced in association with the Gulag Museum at Perm 36, Per
Source: AHA Blog
6-2-08
Each year we take a snapshot of the AHA membership on March 31—an annual exam, if you will—to check the health of the organization. Happily, the number of members is doing well, growing a modest 1.3 percent to 14,903—the highest number of the members since the demographic bubble between 1965 and 1975.
Source: http://www.charleston.net
6-4-08
Charles Edward Lee, a former historic preservation officer for South Carolina and director of its Archives and History Department, died Friday. He was 90.
Lee, a native of Asheville, N.C., began his career in 1946, teaching history at his alma mater, the University of South Carolina.
In the following decade, Lee established himself in the publishing industry. He held editor- ships with the USC Press and the Journal of Modern American History.
In 1961, Lee b
Source: Deborah Lipstadt Blog
6-4-08
The union of academics and professors in the UK, the, which last year tried to initiate a boycott of Israeli academics but was prevented from doing so by its own lawyers which told it that it was illegal, is trying to do the same thing again but in a trickier mode. On May 28 it pas Motion 25 which called for a number of boycott initiatives. Anthony Julius, my solicitor and someone who has done a tremendous amount to fight UK antisemitism, is representing a number of members of t
Source: George Mason University's Center for History and New Media
6-3-08
The National History Education Clearinghouse, an online project that brings U.S. history teachers high-quality support and resources, has been launched by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM) and project partner Stanford University. The clearinghouse is now available to the public at http://teachinghistory.org.
In October 2007, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a $7 million contract, if fully funded over five years, to CHNM, in partnership with Stanford
Source: Interview by HNN intern, David Liebers
6-2-08
Dr. Ronald Walters is director of the African American Leadership Institute and
Scholar Practitioner Program, Distinguished Leadership Scholar at the James
MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership, and
Source: Seattle Times
6-1-08
Rick Perlstein’s new book, “Nixonland,” is the “It” history book of this publishing season. The Chicago historian’s 800-plus-page account of how Richard Nixon stoked and exploited the political divisions of the ’60s has struck a nerve, as analysts argue over whether “Nixonland” — a country at war with itself — still resides in the heart of the U.S. of A.
In the New York Times “Nixonland” review, conservative commentator George H. Will protested that “The nation portrayed in Perlstei
Source: Press Release--U. Connecticut
6-2-08
Thomas Paterson, professor emeritus of history, is the recipient of a lifetime achievement award.
He is the 2008 winner of the Norman and Laura Graebner Award from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the premier professional association for diplomatic history. The award will be given at the annual meeting of the society at Ohio State University on June 28.
The prize recognizes a senior historian of United States foreign relations who has significan
Source: KACIE GLENN in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
6-6-08
When the elder stateswomen of black historians began to pursue their doctoral degrees decades ago, few felt as if they were joining an academic community. Isolated and unappreciated, set apart by their very demands to be included in a university and a discipline that had been dominated by white men, they were braced for a long and lonely battle against the status quo. In Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower (University of North Carolina Press), 17 professors prove by thei
Source: Charlotte Allen in the Weekly Standard
6-2-08
Standing before an audience of about 25 academics, all professors and graduate students specializing in the Middle Ages, in a chilly classroom on the vast campus of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Jeff Persels, a lanky associate professor of French and director of European studies at the University of South Carolina, was reading aloud a scholarly paper at the 43rd International Congress on Medieval Studies. The paper's title was "The Wine in the Urine: Managing Human Waste in Fren
Source: Steve Plaut at frontpagemag.com
5-29-08
HNN EDITOR 6/2/08: A review of the comments posted on this link required that we close the discussion board, which featured numerous statements in violation of our civility rules.
[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.
Source: Press Release--Washington College
6-2-08
MOUNT VERNON, Va. – The fourth 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 29 to Marcus Rediker for The Slave Ship: A Human History (Viking, 2007). In this bicentennial year of the abolition of the slave trade, Rediker – a prize-winning author who chairs the history department at the University of Pittsburgh – was honored for his definitive and painfully evocative account of the floating pri
Source: Thomas Fleming in http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org
5-30-08
In his latest book [Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World], Patrick J. Buchanan has confronted one of the dominant historical myths of the 20th century, the myth of “the last good war” and the heroic British Prime Minister who not only rallied his nation to victory but, unlike Franklin Roosevelt, refused to be taken in by the schemes of Joseph Stalin. In describing this consensus of history teachers, editorialists, and History Channel
Source: Clark Hoyt in the NYT
6-1-08
ON May 12, The Times published an Op-Ed article by Edward N. Luttwak, a military historian, who argued that any hopes that a President Barack Obama might improve relations with the Muslim world were unrealistic because Muslims would be “horrified” once they learned that Obama had abandoned the Islam of his father and embraced Christianity as a young adult.
Under “Muslim law as it is universally understood,” Luttwak wrote, Obama was born a Muslim, and his “conversion” to Christianity
Source: Frederick Kagan and Thomas Donnelly at the website of the American Enterprise Institute
5-26-08
... The active duty portion of the U.S. Army needs to grow to about 800,000 soldiers. That's the size maintained during the 1980s and into the early 1990s, and it is a bare minimum for success in the many and varied missions that will be required in the future--missions that have ranged from "building partnership capacity" in West Africa to tracking down terrorists in Southeast Asia, as well as large-scale invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those who believe that the need
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-30-08
Cambridge classics students have been tested on the best-selling biography of Diana, Princess of Wales, a professor at the prestigious university has disclosed.
Prof Mary Beard said she also made her third-year pupils read tabloid newspapers and transcripts of the notorious "Squidgygate" and "Camillagate" tapes, which revealed intimate details of the princess and the Prince of Wales's extra-marital affairs, for a course about ancient Roman history.
T
Source: Ascribe
5-29-08
CHARLOTTESVILLE, May 29 (AScribe Newswire) -- Take a headline from today's news, add three prominent American historians, give them each a microphone, and listen to their lively conversation as they provide the context that helps you understand just how we got from there to here. That's the premise of a new public radio show from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, based at the University of Virginia. It's called "BackStory with the American History Guys," and it begins airing
