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: Eric Alterman at his blog, Altercation (click on SOURCE for embedded links)
5-29-07
I spent this weekend at the beach with (my family and) three books: I read Al Gore's The Assault on Reason (Penguin), Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson's edited essays, Liberalism for a New Century (University of California) and went for long beach walks with the audio, unabridged version of Walter Isaacson's Einstein, which was published by Simon & Schuster, here, but on audio by Edward Herrmann, here, a terrific actor who always reminds me of Franklin Roosevelt.
Walter's book
Source: Dave Noon's Blog
5-24-07
Fergie, 9 February 2005
That is why the president is more right than he knows to reject calls for an arbitrary departure date. The price of liberty in Iraq will be, if not eternal vigilance on the part of the United States, then certainly 10 years' vigilance.
Fergie, 21 May 2007:
[T]he decision to overthrow Hussein was one of history's great non sequiturs.
Most Americans didn't know who Niall Ferguson was in Spring 2003, so -- unlike those emanating from t
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
5-28-07
Newt Gingrich has a doctorate in modern European history from Tulane and taught history at West Georgia College before he was elected to Congress. William R. Forstchen has a doctorate in American civil war history from Purdue and is an associate professor of history at Montreat College in Montreat, NC. Apparently neither of them ever mastered English prose. See: Janet Maslin,"
Source: HNN Staff
5-29-07
Doris Kearns Goodwin was interviewed by Brian Williams on NBC News tonight about JFK. She was asked to consider: "Would life be different if JFK was alive for his 90th birthday?" She answered it would be. She said it was possible that he would not have plunged into Vietnam in the same way as LBJ--"and that would have changed everything."
Source: AHA Blog
5-28-07
James McPherson, respected Civil War historian and past AHA president, will partake in a daylong colloquium in Andover, Massachusetts on August 25th. Lawrence R. Velvel, Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law will lead the event, entitled "A Day With James McPherson: Interpretations Old and New," with audience-based discussions focused around McPherson’s most recent book This Mighty Scourge. The events of the day, and the discussions generated, will be made into a television program t
Source: http://www.news8austin.com
5-29-07
The chairman of the Department of History at Texas State University is now the state's first State Historian.
Jesus de la Teja was sworn in on Tuesday.
The duties of the state historian include enhancing the knowledge of Texans regarding Texas history and heritage.
The new State Historian says he got to this point thanks to a very famous author.
"I wound up working for James Michener as a research assistant and that's what got me totally h
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
5-28-07
A Canadian political scientist excoriated for attending what was widely labelled a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran has retaliated with a blistering published attack on his university president and his colleagues for being illiterate Islamophobes.
Writing in the influential Literary Review of Canada, Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor at Nova Scotia's St. Francis Xavier University, said that his academic integrity and academic freedom were grossly impugned by the university adm
Source: Independent (UK)
5-28-07
He was among Poland's most acclaimed and respected writers. His works based on his travels across Africa and Latin America, including his bestknown book The Emperor chronicling the downfall of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, put him on course to be tipped for the Nobel Prize.
So why has the distinguished journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died last January at 74, been posthumously "outed" as a spy for the communist-era secret police, and his reputation tarnished for e
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
5-29-07
[Clea Lutz Bunch is an assistant professor of Middle East history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.]
A doctor's receptionist looked at me, wide-eyed, and said with a Southern drawl, "You're going to the Middle East? You must be so brave! Aren't you afraid?" Such statements tend to make me smile; in fact, I often repeat them to amused Jordanians.
I have been in Amman, Jordan, for two weeks at this writing, and I seldom feel afraid. In this era of &q
Source: Media Matters (liberal website that monitors the media) Click on the SOURCE link for embedded links.
5-25-07
On May 24, Media Matters for America offered a brief overview of criticism of previous reporting by Jeff Gerth, the co-author of a soon-to-be-released book about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) titled Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton (Little, Brown).
On May 25, The Washington Post published the first news report based on the text of the book, which Gerth wrote with New York Times reporter Don Van Natta Jr. According to the Post, historian Taylor Branch,
Source: Lloyd Billingsley at FrontpageMag.com -- Review of Larry Berman's Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter & Vietnamese Communist Agent (Smithsonian Books)
5-29-07
[Lloyd Billingsley is the author of From Mainline to Sideline, the Social Witness of the National Council of Churches, and Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.]
In the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Pham Xuan An is a cult hero and the subject of two officially sanctioned books and a 10-part television documentary produced by Ho Chi Minh television in 2005. An's battered Renault is enshrined in an Army museum along with the pistols his comra
Source: Andrew Bacevich in an op ed in the WaPo
5-27-07
Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.
Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each sa
Source: Raymond Ibrahim in National Review Online
5-16-07
Islamic apologist extraordinaire Karen Armstrong is at it again. In an article entitled “Balancing the Prophet” published by the Financial Times, the self-proclaimed “freelance monotheist” engages in what can only be considered second-rate sophistry.The false statements begin in her opening paragraph:Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister
Source: http://www.kansascity.com
5-28-07
The appearance by historian David McCullough at the Truman Library on June 13 has been moved outdoors to meet demand.
McCullough had been scheduled to speak that day in the Truman Library auditorium. Now he will speak at 4:30 p.m. on the front steps of the library, 500 W. U.S. 24 in Independence.
Admission is free. Some reserved seating is available by calling 816-235-6222. Others are encouraged to bring lawn chairs or blankets.
Source: http://www.philly.com
5-28-07
On the windowsill next to his desk in College Hall, Tom Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, displays photographs of the important people in his life.
Next to pictures of his wife and three children are portraits of two men in uniform. Both fought in World War II. Both are captured in their prime - cinematically handsome, winsomely confident, the cream of American manhood.
Childers knows these men well. One is his uncle; the other, his father. They
Source: NYT
5-29-07
James Beck, a Columbia University art historian who became well known as a critic of what he viewed as the ruinous conservation of world masterpieces, including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was cancer, according to Columbia’s department of art history and archaeology.
An Italian Renaissance specialist, Mr. Beck produced 13 books, including three on Raphael and one about the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia, the
Source: Excerpt from Ilan Pappe, "The Best Runner in the Class." Published first by Left Curve; republished by electronicintifada.net
5-1-07
... Musalem Awad was the only practicing Palestinian historian in Israel who had a permanent post in a university. He was also Yaacov's supervisor, and had been interested for years in the 1948 catastrophe, particularly in the war crimes committed in the coastal area. Yet he never dared to write about it himself and felt uneasy when he assigned it to Yaacov.
Musalem was a conservative historian, believing in hard facts as the core material for telling the story of the past. Such ev
Source: Andrew Ferguson in the WSJ
5-25-07
... Following a career with the Labor Department -- he retired in the early 1970s -- Mr. Hall turned himself into the world's foremost authority on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Historians, pros and amateurs alike, sought him out for his knowledge and access to his exhaustive files. As one of them put it, James O. Hall knew more about Lincoln's murder than anyone who ever lived, including John Wilkes Booth.
Uncorrupted by graduate degrees, with no thought of professional adv
Source: Keith Thomas in the NY Review of Books
4-12-07
Hugh Trevor-Roper, who died in 2003, was almost certainly the most gifted of the remarkable generation of British historians who did their best work in the decades after World War II. Yet whereas A.J.P. Taylor, J.H. Plumb, Christopher Hill, R.W. Southern, Alan Bullock, Eric Hobsbawm, Lawrence Stone, Asa Briggs, G.R. Elton, Michael Howard, and E.P. Thompson all went on to publish substantial works worthy of their talents, the general consensus is that Trevor-Roper never entirely fulfilled himself
Source: Boston Globe
5-27-07
Thanks to English novels and countless BBC period pieces, Americans have a rather idealized view of 18th-century English life, impressions that still shape our views of the Mother Country. You could see it in the striking Anglophilia that greeted the queen’s recent visit to our shores, with the deference paid to protocol and ancient notions of refinement.
But the young English historian Emily Cockayne thinks it’s worth noting that historians (and Masterpiece Theatre directors) have
