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: AHA Blog
11-19-07
Council Officers
President
Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Johns Hopkins University (medieval, with a special interest in historiography and linguistic analysis, medieval and contemporary)
President-elect (1-year term)
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Harvard University (U.S. to 1815, comparative gender history since 1600)
Vice-President, Professional Division (3-year term)
David J. Weber, Southern Methodist University (Borderlands, American West, Latin
Source: AP
11-17-07
A prominent Mormon historian and author has been hired to fill a new professorship in Mormon studies at Southern California's Claremont Graduate University. It is the second such academic program at a secular school nationwide, behind only Utah State University.
Richard Lyman Bushman, professor emeritus of early American history at Columbia University, is a devout Mormon who wrote a sprawling 2005 biography of the faith's prophet, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.
His
Source: Rachel Maines in the OAH Newsletter
11-1-07
It took twelve years of research and writing to turn a thin and highly speculative manuscript with the working title of The Vibrator and its Predecessor Technologies into the Johns Hopkins University Press book The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. It took another seven and half years, and more than $150,000, for award-winning documentary filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori to turn it into a feature-length film, Passion and Power, that p
Source: Robert Shaffer in the OAH Newsletter
11-1-07
One of the most striking statements in Alan Greenspan's recently published memoirs is that he is "saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil" (1). The passage is significant for historians and other scholars, of course, in legitimating a discussion of the economic motives of U.S. interactions with the world; after all, if the longtime chair of the Federal Reserve admits that control over resources is a key motive o
Source: Evan Cornog in the Nation
11-20-07
Historians cherish the belief that history is a useful field of study for those wishing to understand the present as well as the past, just as journalists derive great satisfaction from the notion that their hasty work is the "first draft of history." And it seems entirely consistent with Lewis Lapham's distinguished career in journalism that he would decide that creating a quarterly that seeks to explain the present with illuminations from the past would constitute the proper coda to
Source: Michael Winship at the website of Truthout
11-20-07
[Michael Winship, Writers Guild of America Award winner and former writer with Bill Moyers, writes this weekly column for the Messenger Post Newspapers in upstate New York.]
Years ago, during the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-81, a colleague of mine and I took the train from Manhattan down to Princeton, New Jersey's Institute for Advanced Study, where we had an appointment with Bernard Lewis, the renowned, conservative Middle East scholar.
I don't recall much ab
Source: BBC
11-20-07
A leading historian has welcomed a decision to make questions on Scotland's past compulsory for students sitting the Higher history exam.
Dr Fiona Watson, who presented the BBC TV series In Search of Scotland, said the move would underline the importance of Scottish history.
The exam will contain a mandatory Scottish section from 2010/11.
The decision by the Scottish Qualifications Authority came after a campaign by teachers and academics.
The
Source: Max Boot at his Commentary blog
11-19-07
by Max Boot
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
11-19-07
Montreal | Concerns over academic freedom loomed large over the scholarly presentations here at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, a group whose members sometimes confess to feeling as besieged as they do blessed by the contemporary preoccupation with their region of study.
The association's Committee on Academic Freedom reported that it was busier than ever this year sending letters of intervention in cases where it sees the freedom of scholars— either in t
Source: Toronto Star
11-16-07
Round One goes to the teacher in the ongoing dispute between York University and its rabble-rousing professor David Noble.
A labour arbitrator has ruled York violated Noble's academic freedom by issuing a 2004 press release criticizing a controversial pamphlet he penned and ordered the university to pay Noble $2,500 in damages. It must also withdraw the press release from its website.
While Noble failed to win an apology from York for the press release and was awarded a
Source: Inside Higher Ed
11-19-07
In 2003, the American Historical Association got out of the business of adjudicating complaints of plagiarism, saying that the association could best promote good scholarship by issuing standards and promoting education about them. Journals, other publishers and colleges and universities are better suited than an association to consider plagiarism complaints, the AHA said, and they all have various sanctions they can impose.
The move was controversial within the association, in part
Source: David Rivkin, Jr. in the WSJ
11-17-07
"Whoever the next president is, the new administration will be extremely disappointed if it believes that our relationships will mend because its leader has a different name. . . . Personal diplomacy and relationship-building, although important, are rarely the paramount drivers of global affairs. These are shaped importantly by the long-term national interest."
Thus spake Henry Kissinger when I sat down with him recently in New York. Though I'd met him once or twice over
Source: Independent (UK)
11-19-07
The Defence Secretary, Des Browne, is leading a group of politicians and public figures who are boycotting an increasingly divided Oxford Union over the decision by its president to host a talk involving the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving and the BNP leader, Nick Griffin.
The event, entitled Free Speech Forum, which is planned for next Monday, has provoked uproar at the university and beyond. Some Oxford students say they have received death threats and fear they will be t
Source: NYT
11-18-07
Harold J. Berman, a scholar whose expertise in Russian law took him to a Soviet courtroom to fight for royalties owed Arthur Conan Doyle, and whose forceful scholarship altered thinking about Western law’s origins, died on Nov. 13 in Brooklyn. He was 89.
His daughter Jean Berman announced his death.
Mr. Berman wrote 25 books and more than 400 articles on subjects as diverse as Russian culture and comparative legal history. They were published in over 20 languages.
Source: http://www.montrealmirror.com
11-17-07
Many professors keep regular blogs, but few are as widely read, and as controversial, as Juan Cole’s Informed Comment. Cole, a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, is both an example of how an academic may share his expertise with rigour and plain diction—and that such expertise is in demand, judging by the size of the blog’s readership, which Cole says attracts 600,000 to a million visits a month—and, depending on who you ask, an example of how Middle East scholars ar
Source: Robert Townsend in Perspectives, the magazine of the AHA
11-1-07
The average salary for historians in academia lags well behind that of other disciplines, even when the health sciences are excluded. The average salary for historians at all ranks was $59,619—almost 8 percent below the average reported for all fields of $64,743.
According to the College and University Personnel Association–Human Resources (CUPA–HR), there was only a small gap between the average salaries for historians at private and public colleges and universities. Historians at
Source: http://thinkprogress.org/
11-16-07
In an East Room ceremony this morning, President Bush awarded “the recipients of this year’s National Medals of Arts and National Humanities Medals.” Among the scholars and artists recognized by the President was military historian and author Victor Davis Hanson, who received the National Humanities Medal.
The National Humanities Medal is designed to honor those who “deepen” and “broaden” the humanities in America:
"The National Humanities Medal, inaugurated in 199
Source: Harvard Gazette
11-15-07
While Edward Gibbon was publishing his six-volume opus, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” a large portion of Britain’s empire was declaring its independence and fighting to break free of the mother country.
The first volume of Gibbon’s history was published in 1776, just months before representatives from the 13 American Colonies met in Philadelphia to sign the radical and audacious document that declared, “All men are created equal.” While not quite “the shot heard round the
Source: Tom Engelhardt in the Nation
11-15-07
Before I met Jonathan Schell, I already knew him in the best way possible: on the page. Even in his days as a neophyte journalist in Vietnam, he committed a writer's greatest act of generosity. First in the pages of The New Yorker, and then in his books, he took readers to places most of us never could have gone on our own -- to The Village of Ben Suc, for instance, as American troops cleared it of its 3,500 peasant inhabitants and destroyed it in what was, in 1967, the largest military operatio
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of InsideHigherEd.com
11-14-07
Studs Terkel, whose new book Touch and Go: A Memoir (The New Press) appears just a few months after his 95th birthday, has often been called an oral historian for his collections of interviews with “ordinary people,” to use a term he despises for its implicit condescension. I take it from a look through JSTOR that some of the oral historians in academe dispute that label. They have their methods, while Terkel has his.
Terkel works the transcripts of his conversations over so that th
