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: Variety
12-11-07
Production is finally set to begin on a long-delayed TV version of Howard Zinn’s landmark 1980 tome “A People’s History of the United States.”The four-hour documentary miniseries — titled “The People Speak” — will include performances by Matt Damon, Marisa Tomei, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover, Josh Brolin, David Strathairn, Kerry Washington, Eddie Vedder and John Legend.
Zinn will host the longform project, which begins shooting next month in Boston. Project, to be exec produced by
Source: Wayne Hoffman, email sent to HNN
12-11-07
Gay historian Allan Berube, award-winning author of Coming Out Under Fire,
died on December 11, 2007. He was 61.
His death was due to sudden complications following the discovery of two
stomach ulcers, according to his close friend Jonathan Ned Katz, a fellow
gay historian.
Berube was, for decades, an independent historian and community activist.
He first came to progressive political activism in opposition to the
Vietnam war, working with the American Friends Service Committee
Source: John Earl Haynes in a review published in Washington DeCoded.
12-11-07
[John Earl Haynes, a member of Washington DeCoded’s editorial board, is the author (together with Harvey Klehr) of Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2006).]
Eight years after Arthur Herman, here comes Stan Evans with another effort to pull off what most historians would regard as a Herculean (if not Sisyphean) task: the rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy.
As did his predecessor, Evans does an excellent
Source: Inside Higher Ed
12-10-07
David S. Katz’s academic subfield is ambitious — and sparsely populated. How many other Jewish scholars, let alone retired Israeli military captains, make a second academic home for themselves in the educational heartland of one of the world’s most populous Muslim countries in order to teach Christianity?
Katz, an Oxford-trained director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization at Tel Aviv University (where he also teaches Christianity to some Jewish students),
Source: Martin Kramer at his website, Sandstorm
12-10-07
[Martin Kramer is Adelson Institute senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, Wexler-Fromer fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Olin Institute senior fellow at Harvard University.]
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt appear at Princeton University tonight, to promote their book The Israel Lobby. I've held back while other critics have had their say, and many of them have done a splendid job. But I don't think anyone has understood the neat sleight of ha
Source: NYT
12-9-07
John Strugnell, a respected biblical scholar at Harvard whose tenure as the chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls ended in controversy over anti-Semitic remarks he made in an interview, died on Nov. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 77 and lived in nearby Arlington.
He died while hospitalized for an infection associated with treatment of cancer, said his daughter Anne-Christine Strugnell.
At 23, while still a student of languages at the University of Oxford, Mr. Strugnell jo
Source: Salon
11-30-07
The thought of a daily shower would have filled the 17th century Frenchman
with fear. To splash away with abandon, to open your pores and leave your
body vulnerable to all that disease, would be practically asking to get
sick. In fact, our bathing habits would have disgusted him, much like his
habits disgust us: never washing his body with water or soap, for instance.
Or changing his linen shirt to get clean.
How cleanliness has changed in the West is the engrossing (and sometimes
Source: http://www.gainesville.com
12-7-07
A number of parallels have been drawn between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 - both were rare attacks on American soil, both launched the U.S. into war, each has its own set of conspiracy theories.
And retired University of Florida Professor Michael Gannon, a noted Pearl Harbor historian, said some of the shortcomings in the U.S. defense system that led to the Japanese bombing of the Hawaiian base 66 years ago today could teach current political and military leaders some lessons.
Source: Pueblo Chieftain
12-7-07
One of the most important writers to fuel the rise of radical Islam in Egypt and across the Middle East - Sayyid Qutb - based his scathing contempt for the corrupt, sinful West on the months he spent in Greeley in 1949.
"Personally, I'm not sure the devil would know how to tempt people in Greeley today, let alone in 1949," Colorado College professor Dennis Showalter joked to a surprised but laughing audience of about 60 people at a guest lecture Thursday night at Colorado
Source: http://www.coloradoan.com
12-7-07
Former Colorado State University professor James Hansen never set out to write the definitive history of CSU; but 30 years and two books later, he thinks he's finished.
"The fun of something like this is that you keep educating yourself," Hansen said. "The other thing is (discovering) how good your colleagues are. One of the real pleasures of doing this is ... coming to understand their greatness."
Hansen is a history professor emeritus at CSU, where
Source: http://www.eagletribune.com
12-5-07
It is the issue that defined this year's election - development that is changing the face of several parts of the city and, according to some local historians, threatening preservation of Haverhill's past.
Now the issue is playing a role in Mayor James Fiorentini's decision to oust a member of the city's Historical Commission, that member said.
Thomas Spitalere said he believes his support for a local law that would force developers to wait up to a year before demolishi
Source: http://media.www.redandblack.com
12-5-07
Andrew Ladis, 58, a distinguished art historian and member of the University faculty, died Dec. 2 at St. Mary's Hospice in Athens after a long battle with cancer.
At the time of his death, Ladis was the Franklin Professor of Art History at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, a position he held for more than a decade.
A specialist in the painting of the early Italian Renaissance, he played a prominent role in international scholarship in the field, writing or serving as gene
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
12-7-07
[The writer, one of the original editors and translators of the Gospel of Judas, is a professor of religious studies at Chapman University.]
To the Editor:
Re “Gospel Truth” (Op-Ed, Dec. 1), about the Gospel of Judas:
April D. DeConick speaks too confidently when she talks about our mistakes in translation. She knows better. The issues of translation she highlights are almost all discussed in the notes in the popular edition and critical edition of the Gosp
Source: Eric Foner's letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson, which first published Alan Dershowitz's piece
12-6-07
To the editor,
I suppose I should be flattered that so distinguished a personage as Professor Alan M. Dershowitz devoted so much attention to me in a piece in the Crimson. According to him, I am an enemy of free speech because I criticized Columbia President Lee Bollinger's remarks in introducing the president of Iran when he spoke at our University. My real agenda, according to Dershowitz, is that I am "against Israel,&
Source: Alan M. Dershowitz in the Harvard Crimson (Reprinted: Huffington Post/FrontpageMag.com)
12-4-07
Response by Eric Foner.
Do anti-Israel professors "tremble in fear" when they criticize Israel at Harvard and other American universities? Not likely, if you have any sense of what's going on on college campuses today where Israel-bashing is rampant among hard left faculty and students. But a Harvard professor named J. Lorand Matory who teaches anthropology and Afro-American studies, whined to the H
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed summary of the December Issue of Academic Matters: The West's Self-Interest in Islamic Studies
12-5-07
As in the 19th and 20th centuries, the West's interest in Islamic studies continues to be "driven by self-interest," writes Tariq Ramadan, the controversial European Muslim scholar who since 2004 has been barred from residing or working in the United States.
In those past centuries, interest in Islamic studies came largely from colonial powers, such as France and Britain, that were "attempting to understand the religious references and practical motivations of their c
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
12-5-07
Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association tracks the statistical parameters of my professional discipline, and I almost always learn something important from his pieces in our newsletter, Perspectives. In the just-received November issue there is a piece entitled “Left Behind? Historians Lag in the 2006-07 Salary Report.” It is based on numbers provided by the College and University Personnel Association-Human Resources, and it shows history salaries lagging significantly behind the av
Source: Tom Engelhardt at his website, TomDispatch.com
12-4-07
Enter his small office at the Nation Institute only if you don't mind experiencing a slightly vertiginous feeling. Books are everywhere -- in boxes on the floor, on every surface, in, along, and perilously stacked above shelves. If you took a wrong step, you could at least imagine disappearing in a tsunami of tumbling books."That's my Hannah Arendt pile up there," he says, gesturing toward a shelf I'm examining. He's sitting at his desk, his legs up and an iMac perched on his knees. Even her
Source: Robert McHenry at Britannica Blog
11-30-07
Jacques Barzun is 100 today. If you don’t know who he is, go here or here or here or all three.It was about 1988 or ’89, I think, when I attended my first meeting of the Britannica Board of Editors, on which Barzun long serv
Source: http://www.hps.cam.ac.uk
11-27-07
Peter Lipton, the first Hans Rausing Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science, and long-serving head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge died on 25 November 2007. Lipton collapsed after a squash game; his wife was with him when he died.
Professor Lipton was recognized as one of the leading philosophers of science and epistemologists in the world. Born in New York in 1954, he studied physics and philosophy at Wesleyan Univer
