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: Deutsche Welle
1-30-08
Seventy-five years ago, Hitler came to power, ending the Weimar Republic. Did Germany's experiment with democracy between 1919 and 1933 ever stand a real chance? Eric Weitz, a US historian and author, has the answers.
On Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler was named German chancellor, spelling the end to the Weimar Republic -- Germany's convulsive experiment with democracy between 1919 and 1933. The period was dubbed the "Weimar Republic" by historians in honor of the city of Weimar, where a
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-1-08
Thomas Edward Lawrence arrived in the Arabian port city of Jeddah early on the morning of October 16, 1916. Four months earlier, the Arab ruler of Mecca had started a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence, an Oxford-trained archaeologist who joined the ranks of British intelligence at the outset of World War I, was on a fact-finding mission to determine how Britain should respond to what the papers in London were grandiosely dubbing the Great Arab Revolt.
As is well known,
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
2-1-08
Jay Leno may be annoying, but is he a threat to American democracy? That is the eyebrow-raising charge that Russell L. Peterson levels at the host of The Tonight Show and his mainstream comedy peers in Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke (Rutgers University Press).
Peterson, a visiting assistant professor of American studies at the University of Iowa, has clearly spent a great deal of time with a remote control clutched in his hand, clicking his way
Source: http://www.michiganlawyer.com/
2-1-08
So much of a traditional legal education is geared toward passing the bar.
But sometimes issues of social justice can become lost amid the study of torts,
contracts and civil procedure.
Frank H. Wu, the outgoing dean of Wayne State University Law School, has made it
his mission to change that....
To prepare his students for this future, Wu and his wife, Carol"Debbie" Izumi,
pledged $125,000 over a five-year period to create the Izumi Family Fund.
Named in honor of Izum
Source: New Criterion: Notes & Comments
2-1-08
Some projects are born fatuous, some achieve fatuousness, some have fatuousness thrust upon them. Which melancholy comedy best fits the news that A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s anti-American fantasy masquerading as history, is—finally, at last, after so many failed attempts—going to be turned into a television show? Somehow the crowning glory of the farce was the news that the actor Matt Damon (who grew up next to Zinn) would perform in the four-hour miniseries titled “Th
Source: Inside Higher Ed
1-31-08
Welcome to CiteULike, a social bookmarking tool that allows users to post, share and comment on each other’s links — in this case, citations to journal articles with titles like “Trend detection through temporal link analysis” and “The Social Psychology of Inter- and Intragroup Conflict in Governmental Politics.” It’s a sort of “del.icio.us for academics,” said Kevin Emamy, a representative for the site’s London-based holding company, Oversity Ltd. It started out as a personal Web project in 200
Source: National Security Archive
1-31-08
The National Security Archive, along with several leading U.S. historical associations, today is filing a petition in federal court in New York City for the release of grand jury records from the 1951 indictment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of running an espionage ring that passed American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, convicted of spying, and executed in 1953.
Supported by extensive declarations from experts, the petition describes the trial of the Rosenber
Source: Chicago Tribune
1-29-08
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia—This country can't rest its bones.
Skeletons are buried in meadows and beneath parking lots, and just beyond the rumble of trucks and cars near a major highway.
More than 570 hidden grave sites from World War II have been unearthed by a university professor intent on a fair accounting of the past in this former Yugoslav republic now riding high as current holder of the European Union presidency.
A slaughter was conducted in Slovenia in t
Source: Doug Lederman at the website of Inside Higher Ed
1-29-08
Historians for Obama, Economists for Edwards, Academics for Ron Paul (president of the University of Florida for McCain) — scholars are coming out of the woodwork to support the presidential candidate of their choice, seemingly earlier in the campaign and arguably more aggressively than ever before. But lest anyone think that the current activity is a phenomenon purely of today’s punditocracy, our good friends at The Green Bag law journal have (as is their wont) dug into the archives to show us
Source: James McPherson in the NY Review of Books (subscription only)
2-14-08
In 1992 Mark E. Neely Jr. won the Pulitzer Prize in History for his book The Fate of Liberty: Abraham Lincoln and Civil Liberties.[1] In the same year that the book came out he published an influential article in the journal Civil War History titled "Was the Civil War a Total War?"[2] His answer to that question was no. The concept of "total war" had arisen as a way of describing the horrifying destruction of lives and resources in World War II. The generation of historians w
Source: Carl Hartman in a dispatch by the AP
1-27-08
Though it happened 1,300 years ago — some of it less than 600 years ago — Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis says a long military-religious campaign bore seeds of troubled 21st century history....
Lewis sees a resemblance between the advanced Western civilization of today compared with the backwardness of many Muslim countries and the advanced Muslim civilization of the first millennium compared with the backwardness of Europe at the time. He acknowledges the comp
Source: Japan Times
1-27-08
The late Marius Jansen was America's most eminent historian of modern Japan. Admired in Japan and Europe, he not only contributed to the study of Japanese history but also connected that history to the worlds outside this archipelago.
As he said in a 1994 lecture at the Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies: "Japan studied the rest of the world, but until recently that world studied Japan very little." Indeed, it was only with the generation that Jansen represents that &quo
Source: http://www.iol.co.za
1-25-08
A year after the death of renowned Anglo-Zulu War expert David Rattray, whose murder sent shock waves around the world, his unique reputation lives on.
He was killed in front of his wife, Nicky, in a botched attempted robbery at his Fugitives' Drift Lodge and Guest House at Rorke's Drift on January 26 last year.
Police were swift to round up the first of the six-strong gang, and five have so far been arrested. Three have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, including
Source: NYT
1-28-08
In attempt to broaden its online audience, The Washington Post Company on Monday is to introduce an online magazine primarily for a black audience, with news and commentary on politics and culture, and tools for readers to research their family histories.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a writer and a professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard, is the editor in chief of the magazine, called The Root, which he conceived with Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the company.
Source: NYT Book Review
1-27-08
[David Oshinsky, who holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas, is the author of “A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.”]
No American politician of the 20th century is more reviled by historians and opinion makers than Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican whose 1950s anti-Communist crusade is synonymous with witch-hunting and repression. Actually, no politician even comes close. Herbert Hoover? True, the Great Depression occu
Source: NY Review of Books
2-14-08
[HNN Editor: Some 600 people have signed the following statement (originated by the New
York-based Campaign for Peace and Democracy), among them historians: Howard Zinn, Thomas Harrison, Jesse Lemisch, Martin Duberman, Eileen Boris, Rusti Eisenberg, Adam Hochschild, Temma Kaplan, Nelson Lichtenstein, Ervand Abrahamian, David Applebaum, Mike Davis, Rozanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Joan Hoff, Christopher Phelps, Peter Rachleff, Carl Schorske.]
The statement below was delivered by a delegation
Source: NYT
1-27-08
H. Bradford Westerfield, a Yale political scientist whose courses attracted 10,000 students, mostly undergraduates, among them President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, died on Jan. 19 in Watch Hill, R.I. He was 79.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son, Leland Avery Westerfield, said. H. Bradford Westerfield lived in Watch Hill and Hamden, Conn.
Dr. Westerfield’s former students in four decades of teaching, who also included Senators John Ker
Source: Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times blog: Blogging Beijing
1-21-08
Few foreigners know Chinese sports and the Olympic Games like American anthropologist Dr. Susan Brownell.
Since her championship performance in track & field at China's second annual National College Games in 1986, Brownell has worked to build cultural bridges between Beijing and the 'West.'
Her first major work - "Training the Body for China" - was well received in 1995, and her second – "Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China" will
Source: Robert KC Johnson at HNN blog, Cliopatria
1-25-08
William Chafe is widely considered one of the nation’s leading historians of civil rights. The former president of the AHA has, among other works, authored an influential book on the Greensboro sit-ins.In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve come to a very different view of Chafe because of my involvement in the lacrosse case. In March 2006—based on less than one week of press reports—Chafe
Source: Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek excerpt of his new book, The Bush Tragedy
1-28-08
... Wolfowitz and his protégé Scooter Libby, the other most influential neoconservative inside the administration, were driven by a particular notion about how to transform the sick political culture of the Middle East. The big thinker behind their theory was the Arab scholar Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus at Princeton. The originator of the phrase "the clash of civilizations," Lewis believed Muslims had been engaged in a "cosmic struggle for world domination" since the
