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: Press Release--Northwestern
7-5-07
Clarence L. Ver Steeg of Evanston, a distinguished historian who played a key role in the development and expansion of Northwestern University in the 1960s, died July 2 at the age of 84 in the Presbyterian Homes, Evanston.
A funeral service and burial were held today (July 5) in Mr. Ver Steeg’s hometown of Orange City, Iowa.
Mr. Ver Steeg was a noted scholar who headed the University’s Faculty Planning Committee on the 1960s that developed strategic plans for academic a
Source: Steve Plaut at frontpagemag.com (click here for embedded links)
7-9-07
[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.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.]
... Perhaps the best known Israeli academic expatriate who has made a career out of impugning and defaming Israel is Dr. Ilan Pappe, until recently a lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, now at the
Source: Seattle Times
7-6-07
Top-notch journalists such as Tim Weiner of The New York Times are often so busy writing about what happened today that they cannot devote their talent to placing those deadline stories in context.
Fortunately, Weiner has stepped back from his daily coverage of the so-called U.S. government "intelligence" agencies to look at the big picture.
With "Legacy of Ashes," Weiner punctures claims by the spymasters at the Central Intelligence Agency that they
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
7-9-07
[Fatemeh Keshavarz is a professor of Persian language and comparative literature and chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).]
The recent arrest in Iran of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has ignited a storm of protest
Source: LAT frontpage story
7-8-07
"I can't run a shrine," says [Timothy Naftali] the man who ordered the demolition [of the old Watergate exhibit at the Nixon library, which claimed that Nixon was done in by enemies] .... Named last year as the library's first federal director, the Harvard-trained historian is guiding the library's shift from a privately run facility — the only modern presidential library not part of the federal system — to an institution that bears the National Archives' imprimatur.
In e
Source: New York Review of Books
7-17-07
NIALL FERGUSON
To the Editors:
William Dalrymple ["Plain Tales from British India," NYR, April 26], accuses me of having "encouraged the US to embrace empire." He adds in a footnote that I have "recently expressed doubts about the capacity of the US to sustain the imperial interventions he earlier supported."
However, anyone who has read my book Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global P
Source: Tom Maddux in the introduction to the H-Diplo Triumph Forsaken Roundtable
7-2-07
Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 offers the most
sustained challenge to the general consensus among U.S. diplomatic historians
concerning the Vietnam conflict. As the first of a projected two-volume study, the
book focuses on the period through President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s decisions by July
1965 to bomb North Vietnam and commit American ground troops to combat against the
North Vietnamese regular forces and the Viet Cong insurgents. Moyar’s ninety pages of
not
Source: Northern Territory News
7-7-07
A MEMORIAL to Charles Darwin should be built in the city named after him, an historian said yesterday.
Alister Hayes hopes the memorial will be ready for the 200th anniversary of the Englishman's birth in 2009.
A statue of Darwin is to be built near the bus exchange by private developer Allan Garraway.
But some have suggested a bronze monument to the father of evolutionary science should be a centrepiece of the $1.1 billion waterfront development.
Source: Martin Woollacott in the Guardian
7-7-07
It has been Eric Hobsbawm's fate to live to see the institutions whose rise he analysed as a historian of the modern world decline or disappear. Empires are gone, except for one, and that one is floundering. Nation states control less and less, while often pretending they control more and more. Democracy puffs itself up, but politicians wonder privately how long its eroded routines will continue to command allegiance. Mass parties and ideological movements survive largely as shells. Even the reb
Source: New Perspectives Quarterly
5-1-07
Francis Fukuyama is author of the seminal post-Cold War book, The End of History And the Last Man. NPQ editor Nathan Gardels met with Fukuyama at his office at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. in March.
NPQ | The late Isaiah Berlin famously made the distinction between "negative" and "positive" freedom—the first being "freedom from" tyranny and interference and the second being "freedom to" do what one will in his or her zone of no
Source: Associated Baptist Press
7-6-07
One of the most prominent historians of American evangelicalism called on “true Baptists” to re-assert their prophetic role “as watchmen on the wall of separation between church and state.”
Randall Ballmer, a history professor at Columbia University, told more than 550 supporters of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty that many of America’s Baptists, in recent decades, have “lost their way.”
“They have been seduced by leaders of the Religious Right into th
Source: http://www.aikenstandard.com
7-5-07
A lifelong Civil War historian will be bringing his latest work to The Book Stall later this month for a book signing.
Orangeburg's Walter Brian Cisco, author of "War Crimes Against Southern Civilians," will be at the Hayne Avenue bookstore from noon to 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 25.
Cisco is a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War and a recipient of the Army Commendation Medal. He also served as a captain of the South Carolina State Guard.
His long-he
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) (Click here for embedded links.)
7-6-07
Juan R.I. Cole turned some heads this week when he announced the launch of a new group blog on current events, Informed Comment Global Affairs. We had a number of questions for the University of Michigan historian -- and frequent Review contributor -- that he was kind enough to answer by e-mail.
[CHE] Why did you start the original Informed Comment, your blog on the Middle East, and how important has its growth and popularity been to your car
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
7-6-07
... Mr. Dyson's departure had no slice of controversy, only confusion. Before any official moves were announced, the 48-year-old scholar, who is an authority on hip-hop and many other cultural topics, listed himself as a university professor at Georgetown on a Web site promoting his new book.
Terrence P. Reynolds, chairman of the theology department at Georgetown, said this week that he had heard conversations about Mr. Dyson, but that they were at a level above him. "It may be
Source: Hartford Courant
7-5-07
COLEBROOK, CT Fourth of July orations have long been a chance to measure the nation against its ideals, historian Eric Foner told residents gathered for the annual Independence Day celebration Wednesday.
Two centuries ago, Foner said, speakers questioned how a nation professing to be a beacon of freedom could practice slavery.
Then Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, offered a modern-day version of that challenge.
In the
Source: HNN Staff
7-5-07
Back in January, after the arrest of historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto for jaywalking at the annual convention of the American Historical Association, the Atlanta mayor's offfice indicated that a full investigation would be undertaken to find out what happened.
HNN on several occasions has called the mayor's office in Atlanta to follow-up. Each time we were instruicted to leave a voice mail for the press office. Each time we got no
Source: New Republic
6-29-07
In the latest issue of the New Republic columnist Michael Kinsley, founder of Slate, calls Douglas Brinkley "America's historian-on-steroids."
Kinsley makes the remark in passing in an article about an error that creeped into Reagan's Diary, which was edited by Brinkley for HarperCollins.
Kinsley is named in the index. Page 400. According to the book Kinsley had lunch with Reagan on March 21, 1986.
Only he didn't.
In a jocular
Source: John Gravois in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
7-6-07
I had a fat chance of finding a Dungeons & Dragons game in Kalamazoo, they told me. It was a harebrained quest. But it was a quest, at least, and that seemed appropriate.
In early May, I set out for the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, the world's premier annual gathering of scholars who study the middle ages. The congress is probably the best place to hear the latest research on early vernacular Bibles and Norse myths, but my goal was t
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
7-5-07
In late April, John D. Lewis, a historian and classicist at Ashland University, flew to Virginia to deliver a lecture at George Mason University about U.S. policy toward Iran. Mr. Lewis is an admirer of the late Ayn Rand, and he shares her belief that democracies should respond to external attacks without much concern for civilian casualties. He wrote in an essay in 2006 that "America, acting alone and with overwhelming force, must destroy the Iranian Islamic State now. It must do so openly
Source: Theodore Dalrymple at http://www.newenglishreview.org
7-1-07
... In 2002, the Australian free-lance historian and journalist, Keith Windschuttle, published a book that created a controversy that has still not died down. Entitled ‘The Fabrication of Aboriginal History,’ it sets out to destroy the idea that there had been a genocide of Tasmanian aborigines carried out by the early European settlers of the island.
For about the previous quarter century, it was more or less an historical orthodoxy that there had been such a genocide. Robert Hughe
