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: Austin American-Statesman
6-3-07
It's not at all hard to explain. Music helps prominent and prolific historian and author Douglas Brinkley write. Austin has lots of music.
So here Brinkley, his wife and three children are, settling into their big new house in Stratford Hills off Red Bud Trail, Brinkley having just left his job at Tulane University in New Orleans — where he was director of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilization and a history professor — for a new post at Rice University in Houston.
Source: http://blog.wired.com
6-1-07
Students will be learning history Sid Meier-style when HistoriCanada: The New World, a Civ III mod, is donated to 100,000 Canadian high schools. Produced by Bitcasters and developed by 2k Games, HistoriCanada lets players take control of one of Canada's early European or aboriginal civilizations, making decisions for them about everything from crop development to war.
The history-teaching part comes from playing through scenarios and answering questions about Canada's history as the
Source: NYT
6-1-07
A furor has erupted at a New York City private high school over a history teacher’s satirical novel, his impending departure and, now, accusations that administrators barred the student newspaper from publishing a letter by prominent historians and scholars who had come to the teacher’s defense.
The controversy, which has divided teachers, parents and students at the Horace Mann School, a private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, erupted this week.
The Recor
Source: Historian John Price writing at the website of Japan Focus
5-26-07
Fifty years ago, the Canadian diplomat and noted Japan scholar, Herbert Norman, committed suicide, stepping off the roof of a nine-storey building in downtown Cairo. Canadian ambassador to Egypt at the time, Norman was 47 years old and his death on April 4, 1957 provoked a crisis in Canada-U.S. relations.
Norman’s last act came in the wake of accusations made in the U.S. Senate that he was disloyal, a possible communist spy. This was the third round of such charges. On each occasion
Source: NewsHour (PBS)
5-28-07
[Shaul Bakhash is a historian at George Mason University. He is married to Haleh Esfandiari, the American citizen and the director of the Middle Eastern program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington who has been accused by Iran of spying.]
JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, Professor Bakhash, your wife, Haleh Esfandiari, couldn't leave Iran since December, has been in prison since earlier in May. What's the latest on her condition?
SHAUL BAKHASH,
Source: Victor Davis Hanson at National Review
5-30-07
The great American classicist W. K. Pritchett passed away this Tuesday at 98 in Berkeley. WKP, as he was called, reshaped the study of ancient Greek topography, and spent much of his life finding ancient routes, battlefields, and harbors, establishing the nature of the Athenian calendar, defending the authority of the Greek historians from postmodern attacks, and writing a massive five-volume history of the Greek state at war-much of all this in his retirement after a long career of philological
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-30-07
Simon Sebag Montefiore's young son, Sasha, knows what it feels like to live with a dictator. When his dad came down to breakfast the other day, the four-year-old chirped up: "Morning, Young Stalin!'' Like the rest of us, he is finding his father's obsession difficult to ignore.
Between recommendations for hair loss treatments, vasectomies and the musical Spamalot, Stalin's sinister portrait is currently hogging five consecutive escalator advert boards on the London Tube. "
Source: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk
6-1-07
A brilliant new book by a Mexican-American historian documents how, in the Twenties and Thirties, the Nazis were inspired by what the United States had been doing to their Mexican neighbours since 1917.
In Ringside at the Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, David Dorado Romo establishes the US Immigration Department's systematic brutality along the Rio Grande border.
Mexican visitors were forced to strip naked and subjected to 'screening'
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
5-31-07
The National History Center is hosting a day-long conference on Reforming History Education on June 12, 2007, at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. beginning at 10:00 a.m. The conference, co-sponsored by the American Historical Association, Newberry Library, National Council for the Social Studies, and Organization of American Historians, will address the current state of history education policy and future reforms in light of recent advances in student learning, teacher preparation, asse
Source: Staten Island Advance
5-30-07
Borough President James P. Molinaro has named Tottenville resident Thomas Matteo to be the fourth borough historian to serve Staten Island.
"Staten Island is a rich borough in history," Molinaro said. "We need somebody who can exemplify that, explain that."
Staten Island Advance/Irving SilversteinBorough President James Molinaro, right, and new borough historian Thomas Matteo talk at a press conference at Borough Hall.
Matteo, 58, succeeds Ric
Source: AP
5-30-07
Patrick Stockstill, historian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and backstage "keeper of the Oscars" during ceremonies, has died. He was 57.
Stockstill died May 24 of complications following a heart transplant, according to the academy and Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills, where a funeral was planned Wednesday afternoon.
Stockstill started as an assistant librarian at the academy's Margaret Herrick Library in 1982 and was named acad
Source: Gerard Baker in the WSJ
5-31-07
... The European Union's leaders are in the midst of lengthy celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Communities. At the same time, the gloom that enveloped the EU after the French and Dutch rejected its beloved constitutional treaty two years ago has been replaced by a restrained optimism that the show might just be put back on the road this summer.
Is it possible, then, that the writers who have spent the past few years predicting Europe's collaps
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of CampusWatch
5-30-07
[Cinnamon Stillwell is Northern California Representative for Campus Watch.]
What's ailing contemporary Middle East studies? A symposium earlier this month at Stanford University provided a clue.
A paranoid fixation on imagined American and Israeli"empire"; the refusal to accept legitimate criticism; an insulated, elitist worldview; an inability to employ clear, jargon-free English; and a self-defeating hostility towards the West: these vices and more were made clear at
Source: Alexandra M. Lord at the website of the Chronicle of Higher Ed
5-30-07
[Alexandra M. Lord is the acting historian for the U.S. Public Health Service and the cocreator of a Web site, Beyond Academe, designed to help historians find nonacademic careers.]
"How long did you adjunct," whispered the professor, "before you became a public historian?" He glanced over his shoulder, as though concerned that we might be overheard discussing that great taboo for Ph.D.'s, a nonacademic career path.
Surely the only reason I had left
Source: Marty Lederman (blog)
5-30-07
"Cool, Carefully Considered, Methodical, Prolonged and Repeated Subjection of Captives to Physical Torment, and the Accompanying Psychological Terror"[.]
That's the description of the CIA "enhanced interrogation" program by someone who has studied it -- Philip Zelikow, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and, until recently, a close advisor to the Secretary of State. In what the
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
5-28-07
We were surprised to read in The Globe and Mail that the Canadian Association of University Teachers was so outspokenly supportive of Professor Shiraz Dossa, who attended the Holocaust denial conference in Teheran this past fall.
Professor Dossa's complaint, as we understand it, is that he has been subject to much criticism, not to discipline. Academic freedom and freedom of expression, which we all support, does not render any
Source: Maureen Dowd in the NYT
5-30-07
... Donald Kagan, a respected Yale historian who has written authoritatively on the Peloponnesian War, is the father of Robert Kagan, a neocon who pushed for the Iraq invasion, and Frederick Kagan, a military historian who urged the surge.
I called Professor Kagan to ask him if Thucydides, the master at chronicling hubris and imperial overreaching, might provide the new war czar with any wisdom that can help America sort through the morass of Iraq.
Very much his sons’ f
Source: NYT
5-30-07
[Shaul Bakhash is a historian at George Mason University. He is married to Haleh Esfandiari, the American citizen and the director of the Middle Eastern program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington who has been charged by Iran with undermining the regime.]
... Yes, big, tough President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the man who shows us how tough he is by declaring the Holocaust a myth — had his goons arrest Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old scholar, grandmothe
Source: Houston Chronicle
5-28-07
Historian Douglas Brinkley has written on everything from Hurricane Katrina to Jack Kerouac to civil rights icon Rosa Parks, but presidential history has always been one of his passions. He's produced biographies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter as well as a book on presidential hopeful John Kerry's Vietnam War experiences.
The Reagan Diaries is the latest from the prolific Brinkley, who in July joins the history department at Rice University. The 767-page Diaries represents a substa
Source: Telegraph (UK)
5-29-07
Edward Behr, who died on Saturday aged 81, enjoyed a long career covering wars from Algeria to Angola and Vietnam for American magazines before turning to writing books and television documentaries.
Notable among his books were The Algeria Problem; Hirohito: Behind the Myth; The Last Emperor, a study of the boy emperor Pu Yi; and Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, an account of the rise and fall of the Ceausescus in Romania.
In Hirohito, published in 1989, Behr concluded th
