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: Robin Moroney in the WSJ
6-28-07
Historians often have regarded tourism as an exploitative and destructive force on communities throughout the U.S., a view that one scholar finds too limited. Within the academy, the development of tourism in the U.S. has been framed as a story of resort towns that trap the locals into low-paid jobs and make housing unaffordable, says Lawrence Culver, an assistant professor of history at Utah State University. Local culture, meanwhile, gets stamped out in favor of more homogenized amenities. But
Source: Ted Widmer in an Op Ed in the NYT
6-30-07
[Ted Widmer, the director of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University, is the author of the forthcoming “Ark of the Liberties: America and the World.”]
IF you sail due south from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, you will eventually come to a tiny tear-shaped island with no beaches, no water and no human beings. Navassa, its enormous limestone cliffs rising straight out of the sea, is the oldest continuous overseas possession of the United States, older than Guantánamo, the Virgin Isla
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT
6-30-07
To the Editor:
The Supreme Court’s decision to block the use of race for school integration tragically sets the clock as well as the quest for equality back in time.
If the next president is a Democrat, he or she will try to undo the damage created by the Bush administration, but will be confronted with a reactionary Supreme Court, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was in the 1930s.
But while a majority of the members of the high court in the ’30s were close to
Source: HNN Editor Rick Shenkman
6-29-07
A few weeks ago newspaper-page-flipping New York Times readers (such as HNN's editor's mother) may have seen this double-take advertisement:
Dallek at Dallek's?
A publicity man's dream headline. What's behind it?
Turns out Robert Dallek's uncles own the well-known Dallek's furniture store, he told us in an email. When the book came out they asked him to make an appearance and sign copie
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review by Dan Simon.
6-24-07
[Simon is the publisher of Seven Stories Press. ]
In his review of Howard Zinn's "Young People's History of the United States" (June 17), Walter Kirn misses the point. It isn't just that behind our socalled great leaders are often corporate business interests and other such uninspiring truths of history, but also that there is another unheralded force at work, one that indeed is very inspiring — the history of popular movements and of everyday people doing extraordinary t
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
6-29-07
Our colleague, Chris Bray, passes along a recommendation that you have a look at: Bruce Schneier,"Strong Laws, Smart Tech Can Stop Abusive ‘Data Reuse'," Wired, 28 June. It's a thoughtful piece that grounds its argument in historical experience and warns about the growing problem of a"data shadow, which always follows me around but I can never see." Read the whole thing, as the
Source: NYT
6-27-07
For more than 30 years, the Family Jewels have clouded the C.I.A.’s reputation, even though most of their contents have long been known from official reports and ad hoc disclosures. William Colby — who oversaw the compilation of the Jewels while serving as the agency’s operations chief and director-designate — is the source of some durable misconceptions about them. In his memoir, Honorable Men (p. 340), Colby says that the Jewels consist of “693 pages of possible violations of, or at least ques
Source: Investor's Business Daily
6-28-07
[Furnish is an associate professor of history at Georgia Perimeter College in Dunwoody, Ga., and the author of "Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden" (2005). He writes occasionally for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
I was cautiously optimistic that my quest to move from a community college to a four-year school might succeed this time. The gatekeepers at the annual conference of the American Historical Association, where thous
Source: Guardian
6-29-07
Eugen Weber, who has died aged 82, was one of the most distinguished historians of modern France. He wrote on a wide variety of subjects, ranging from French sport to Romanian fascism, and was the author of a seminal study of the transformation of the French countryside in the last three decades of the 19th century.
Born to a Romanian family in Bucharest, Weber spent his entire academic career in the west. His origins were important, however, to his later development. As he wrote: &
Source: Simon Jenkins in the Guardian
6-29-07
A memorial service in London's Reform Club on Monday celebrated the late Arthur Schlesinger, finest of American postwar historians. Lauren Bacall, Edna O'Brien and admiring academics, diplomats and friends sang his praises. In the library from where Phileas Fogg set off round the world in 80 days, Schlesinger's memory rounded it in 90 years.
Schlesinger was the best sort of historian, an arguing one. It was impossible to meet him, even in old age, without some exquisite dispute. He
Source: John Sutherland in the Guardian
6-27-07
... Much has been made (notably by himself, in his recent acceptance speech) of Brown's being a son of the manse. It's true that he inherits his church's missionary zeal (something that distinguishes it from its languid Anglican counterpart). But more significant is the fact that he was associated with the history department at Edinburgh for 15 years - from matriculation in 1967, through the award of his honours degree, to the completion of his PhD in 1982.
Although, democratic inte
Source: FrontpageMag.com
6-28-07
[Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Interdisciplinary university and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs |(MERIA) Journal. His new book, The Truth About Syria, is being published by Palgrave-Macmillan in May. ]
Dear Career Counselor:
I am in bad shape. I cannot get a job or support myself. I want to be rich and famous and powerful but I have no idea what to do. Can you suggest a powerful, presti
Source: Roundtable in the Journal of American History: American Faces: Twentieth-Century Photographs
6-1-07
Several of the essays speak with a personal voice. This departure from traditional JAH tone and style is deliberate, as one of our purposes is to juxtapose different voices on related topics and themes in the history of American photography, to provoke further questions about the images, and to tease out the connections and tensions be-tween them. For example, Claude Cookman and Ted Engelmann contemplate the painful (and, for the victims of the My Lai massacre, fatal) consequences of taking ph
Source: Gil Troy writing at the website of http://www.newsobserver.com
6-17-07
Poor Patrice Higonnet. The Parisian-born historian has a great life. He loves being Robert Walton Goelet Professor of French History at Harvard University. He is charmed by his Harvard students, as he admits in "Graduation Day," the lovely, elegiac preface to "Attendant Cruelties: Nation and Nationalism in American History."
But he cannot reconcile the colorful all-American palette of fresh-faced idealists he encounters in Harvard Yard with the dark hues of Geor
Source: Mary L. Dudziak at her blog, Legal History (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.)
6-19-07
"Reading the Founders’ Minds" is the title of a review by Gordon S. Wood in the June 28 issue of the New York Review of Books. The review takes up important questions of historical method, and also a critical question about the vision at the nation’s founding. Because of the importance of this review, and also because of the sharpness of the criticism of the reviewed books, I’ve invited the authors of the reviewed books to provide commentary on the Legal History Blog, and I have invite
Source: http://www.24dash.com
6-27-07
Author and TV historian Simon Schama will deliver a tribute to slavery abolition pioneer Granville Sharp in a memorial service at All Saints Church on July 8.
It will mark the completion of conservation work on Sharp’s tomb in All Saints churchyard.
The service, on the nearest Sunday to the anniversary of Sharp’s death on 6 July 1813, is the culmination of a campaign to repair the tomb of the man known as the ‘father of the abolition movement’.
The conserv
Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com
6-27-07
Frontpage Interview’s guests today are Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez.
Isabella Ginor is a Research Fellow of the Hebrew University's Truman Institute. She came to Israel from her native Ukraine shortly before the Six-Day War. She was a specialist on the former USSR at the leading Israeli newspaper Haaretz and is a frequent commentator for other national and foreign media.
Gideon Remez is a sabra and historian by training. He fought in the Six-Day war as an Israeli pa
Source: http://www.southbendtribune.com
6-21-07
Mark A. Noll, a man many Americans may never have heard of, reclines in his office chair dressed in jeans and a polo shirt. A soft-spoken man and now a professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, he was named one of the top 25 most influential evangelicals in America by Time magazine in 2005.
Unlike the late Jerry Falwell, known for his booming personality and media savvy, Noll has achieved recognition within the evangelical community and beyond through his powerful schola
Source: Guardian
6-26-07
Baruch Kimmerling, who has died aged 67, was probably the first Israeli academic to analyse Zionism in settler- immigrant, colonialist terms. He described his homeland as being "built on the ruins of another society". A devoted atheist, he lamented Jews' and Arabs' failure to "separate religion from nationality".
Though associated with the "new historians" who question the official narrative of Israel's creation, Kimmerling was a sociologist by training. In h
Source: Tom Plate in the Seattle Times
6-14-07
LOS ANGELES — America needs more people like Prof. Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a heretofore humble academic here on the West Coast. Let me explain.
Understanding China is going to remain irritatingly difficult. It's an obviously important but intensely problematic place, with a possibly fabulous or possibly tragic future. We maybe have a better shot figuring out the future of India, or even Mars.
If we leave the job of thinking about China to our general mass news media, we wi
