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: Detroit Free Press
1-11-08
Tom Sugrue is back.
He's not quite a household name, but Sugrue has developed a cult following in metro Detroit and across the United States after the 1996 publication of his award-winning book, "The Origins of the Urban Crisis," which redefined the story of economic decline in Detroit and other industrial cities since World War II.
A native Detroiter who teaches American history at the University of Pennsylvania, Sugrue drew a crowd Thursday at the Wayne Stat
Source: Tulsa World
1-11-08
One of the three former Oral Roberts University professors who sued the university for wrongful termination last fall has been reinstated in a settlement reached late Thursday.
Jo Anne Deaton, who with John Tucker represents all the defendants except former ORU President Richard Roberts, told the Tulsa World that the defendants had reached a settlement with former professor John Swails. The details of the settlement, which came after a full day of negotiations, were not released.
Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
1-11-08
[Ms. Lipstadt is Dorot professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.]
As readers of this blog know, I do not label people or writings as antisemitic unless they are blatnatly so. Well Gandhi's grandson has written a column for the Washington Post which is clearly so.
Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of “Mahatma” Gandhi and is president and co-founder of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence.
Source: Harvard Crimosn
1-9-08
Only days before she was installed as Harvard’s 28th president, Drew G. Faust received a message from the past.
It came in the form of a letter written in 1951 by then-President James B. Conant ‘14, who sealed it with instructions that it should be opened by the first Harvard president of the 21st century. The letter was lost in the Harvard Archives during the tenure of Lawrence H. Summers—or maybe it was just waiting.
The letter resurfaced just in time for Faust, a h
Source: Yanek Mieczkowski, writing for HNN
1-10-08
[Dr. Mieczkowski is chair of the History Department at Dowling College and author of Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s (2005) and The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections (2001). ]
The historical profession lost a giant with the passing of John A. Garraty, the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University. The author and editor of numerous American history books, Garraty was one of the most prolific historians of his generation.
Source: Paul Buhle at the website of Inside Higher Ed
1-10-08
[Paul Buhle is a senior lecturer in history at Brown University. He is editor of the forthcoming A People's History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008), an adaptation in comics form of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980).]
History comics seem to have been a long time in coming, but readers of graphic novels have probably been expecting them for years. Art Spiegelman's Maus, drawn from the oral history of his father, a Holocaust su
Source: Deutsche Welle
1-8-08
Historians have typically characterized Palestinians collectively as Hitler-supporters during the Nazi regime. But a German researcher has said that they were more concerned with relations with an other European country.
Any historical conversation in Germany over Palestine and National Socialism usually turns to one name: Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini. The Muslim leader was an anti-Semite, a passionate follower of the Nazis and moved to Germany in 1941 to collaborate with Hitler's re
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-9-08
In the early hours of April 25, 1974, Europe's oldest remaining dictatorship was overthrown by a small cadre of left-wing officers in the Portuguese military. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see how that event sparked an unprecedented wave of democratization that would ultimately spread well beyond the streets of Lisbon. Consider that in the mid-1980s, about two in every five states worldwide were democratic. A decade later, it was three in every five states. Though that democratic boom pe
Source: AP
1-7-08
BEIRUT, Lebanon: A vocal American critic of Israel met Monday with a senior official from the militant Hezbollah group and visited villages in southern Lebanon that witnessed heavy fighting in the 2006 war between the guerrillas and the Jewish state.
Norman Finkelstein, who resigned last year as a political science professor at DePaul University in Chicago, met Hezbollah's commander in south Lebanon, Nabil Kaouk, in his office in the coastal city of Tyre.
He visited the
Source: Cass R. Sunstein in the New Republic
12-27-07
[Cass R. Sunstein is a contributing editor at The New Republic and teaches at the University of Chicago. Over the years, he has offered informal advice to both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama; a long-term law school colleague of the latter, he has acted as an occasional, informal adviser to his campaign.]
The Compact Oxford Dictionary of Current English offers several definitions of the word "smear." One is "coat or mark with a greasy or sticky substance." Anot
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-11-08
In 2002, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a Mark Twain scholar at Stanford University, discovered a forgotten play written by Twain in 1898 that had never been performed. Fishkin published Is He Dead? in 2003 and produced the play, which opened on Broadway last month at the Lyceum Theatre. Directed by Michael Blakemore and adapted by David Ives, the production has earned positive reviews, including one from The Village Voice's Michael Feingold, who praised its "good humor, good energy, and a sweet u
Source: Renehan Blog
1-4-08
During February of 2007, I called for the disbanding of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, a venerable organization which has, since 1919, kindled the flame of memory for our nation's twenty-sixth President. Now I've changed my mind. Simply put, my doubts about the long-range importance of the TRA were unfounded. In line with its long and distinguished record of preserving and making available to the public the numerous historic places and the multitudinous historical records pertaining to the
Source: http://www.international.ucla.edu
1-2-08
Many of those who have worked with and studied under Miriam R. Silverberg came together to tell poignant and humorous anecdotes about their encounters with her at a two-day symposium on "Imperial Japan and Colonial Sensibility: Affect, Object, Embodiment." The event celebrated the work of its original organizer, Silverberg, including her recently published book Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Silverberg was unable to attend the Dec. 7-8, 2007 sympo
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-11-08
Any interview with the author of a new scholarly book inevitably includes the question what's next? Drew Gilpin Faust, whose This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is just out, has pondered the question quite a bit. Always direct (after all, she grew up the only daughter among three sons, often at odds with her mother about the dictates of femininity), she says: "I don't expect to be writing a lot more Civil War history."
That may not be surprising co
Source: Edward L. Ayers in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
1-11-08
Long before she became the first female president of Harvard University in July 2007, Drew Gilpin Faust showed herself to be an inventive, energetic, and restless historian. Her first book, in 1977, focused on a subject many people had doubted was a subject, "the intellectual in the Old South." Five years later, she produced what is still the fullest — and most disturbing — portrayal of a white Southern planter, a man who sought complete mastery over the white women in his charge as we
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
1-7-07
To most academics, plagiarism is a serious violation of professional ethics. But even as professors consider which combination of software, policies and education can teach undergraduates about academic integrity, many are unsure about how to handle allegations against fellow scholars.
The issue has been vexing to the American Historical Association, which got itself out of the business of adjudicating plagiarism disputes in 2003, but where no real consensus has emerged about who sh
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
1-7-08
At the beginning of a discussion on “closing the ‘passion gap’ in graduate education,” audience members at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association were asked whether they were graduate students or professors. The audience was lopsided grad students.
But judging from the discussion, professors in a number of programs are aware and concerned about the “passion gap” — enough to be rethinking some policies. One consensus on the panel was that even though undergraduates
Source: AP
1-4-08
The recently retired director of the National Museum of the American Indian spent $48,500 in museum funds to commission a portrait of himself and selected a non-Indian artist to create it, a newspaper reported Friday.
The portrait of W. Richard West Jr. by New York painter Burton Silverman hangs in a fourth-floor lounge of the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution and is dedicated to the arts and culture of American Indians.
West, who has come under fire
Source: Washington Times
1-2-08
Black history authorities say getting more black-history sites on the National Register of Historic Places requires nominating more sites and including recent research on existing nominations.
Mary Harris, from Adamstown, Md., counts freed slaves among her ancestors. She joined with regional historians at a mid-November workshop in Buckeystown to accomplish these two strategies.
She detailed how after emancipation, former slaves quickly began living in the tobacco shack
Source: Inside Higher Ed
1-2-08
For every James Meredith, who gained fame for becoming the first black student at the University of Mississippi, there were many other students who broke racial barriers without attracting much attention. Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners and College Campuses (University Press of Florida) tells the stories of some of those students and also portrays the broader story of the desegregation of higher education — which the essays in the book argue was
