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: PRNewswire
5-22-07
Award-winning television historian Tim Brooks, whose seminal book The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present is considered the pre-eminent industry reference work, will conclude his remarkable 30-plus-year career as a research executive when he retires as Lifetime Networks' Executive Vice President of Research at the end of 2007.
Brooks, whose career has spanned senior positions at NBC, USA Networks and NW Ayer, joined Lifetime in January 2000. His
Source: PBS NewsHour
5-21-07
JUDY WOODRUFF: From Vietnam to the open-door policy with China, and of course Watergate, the tumultuous years of the Nixon White House had a profound effect on the modern presidency. But behind the scenes, it was the interaction between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and secretary of state, that influenced much of the administration's policy.
Not long ago, the National Archives released tens of thousands of pages of documents and hours of audiotapes
Source: Crimson
5-22-07
Robert C. Darnton '60, a historian of 18th-century France from Princeton, will serve as the director of the Harvard University Library, Provost Steven E. Hyman announced Tuesday afternoon.
Darnton will replace long-time library director Sidney Verba '53 on July 1 and assume Verba's post as the Pforzheimer University Professor. Verba announced his intention to retire in September after directing the University's 90 libraries for 23 years.
Darnton, a scholar in the &quo
Source: Richard J. Evans in the Nation
6-4-07
It's been fascinating following Ian Kershaw's trajectory as a historian over the years. Trained as a specialist in the social and economic history of English monasteries in the Middle Ages, Kershaw changed countries and centuries in the late 1970s, in search of topics more relevant than medieval estate management. Two pathbreaking books were the result: The "Hitler Myth": Image and Reality in the Third Reich (published in German in 1980; translated into English in 1987) and Popular Opi
Source: David Samuels in the Atlantic Monthly online
4-18-07
Q. Tell me what it was like being a young academic—or a younger academic, a youngish academic—and suddenly coming into the superheated political environment of the Nixon White House with all these powerful—
A. Well, Nixon wasn’t my first White House experience. My first White House experience was as a Kennedy consultant. So if I hadn't had that, I probably couldn’t have done the Nixon period, because they taught me what can go on in a White House. But you’re not doing an article abo
Source: American Conservative
5-21-07
[Wilson Burman is the pen name for a New York City financial executive who writes The Cunning Realist blog. ]
If Alexis de Tocqueville had sat in the bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium for an entire summer, he would have been an even more interesting read. Fortunately, we had our own master observer of Americana. That the essence of the nation’s character resides in its grandest pursuits as well as its simplest rituals is the legacy of David Halberstam.
Halberstam’s death on Apr
Source: Democracy Now
5-21-07
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour examining the life and death of Malcolm X, one of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century. Saturday would have been Malcolm X's eighty-second birthday. This is Malcolm X speaking a week before he was assassinated in 1965.
MALCOLM X: …my house was bombed. It was bombed by the Black Muslim movement upon the orders of Elijah Muhammad. Now, they had come around to -- they had planned to do it from the front and the back so t
Source: Judith Dobrzynski in the WSJ
5-22-07
If Mr. Cole is known at all--NEH chairmen rarely make headlines--it's for statements like "History is a safeguard for our democracy" and "It's part of our national security." In speeches, he frequently cites appalling statistics--half the students in elite universities cannot date the Civil War to the correct half-century, for example, and more people can name the Three Stooges than can list the three government branches. Noting that Americans are united not by race or religi
Source: Juan Cole at Informed Comment (blog)
5-22-07
[HNN Editor: Shaul Bakhash teaches history at George Mason University. His wife is Haleh Esfandiari.]
The Iranian government has now charged detained Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari with trying to overthrow the current regime, according to the Washington Post's Robin Wright. This AP
Source: Haaretz
5-21-07
Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, one of the first to apply post-colonial theories to the Zionist movement, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 67.
Despite his lack of training as a historian, Professor Kimmerling was identified with "the new historians" who provided alternative views on Israel's history. He also studied Israeli power structures.
Defining himself as a "sociologist of politics in the wider sense of the term
Source: Poland.pl
5-20-07
Self-taught British historian David Irving, was ordered out of International Warsaw Book Fair where he was attempting to display his books – the fairs' organizers informed.
Irving is a convicted Holocaust denier – he spent more than a year in an Austrian jail for denying the Nazis organized mass murder of six million Jews during World War Two.
According to Grzegorz Guzowski, the organizers received detailed materials on his work from Irving's publishers only a few hours
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
5-21-07
Will a surge of U.S. troops make a difference in Iraq? How viable is the current Iraqi government? Will an American withdrawal lead to all-out civil war?
In a new book, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale University Press), Ali A. Allawi argues that American forces failed to understand what they were getting into and made numerous costly mistakes along the way. He brings an insider's perspective to the subject: A longtime opponent of the Baathist regime,
Source: Clive Thompson in Wired
5-21-07
What if the great events in history had turned out differently? How would the world today be changed?
Niall Ferguson wonders about this a lot. He's a well-known economic historian at New York University, and a champion of "counterfactual thinking," or the re-imagining of major historical events, with the variables slightly tweaked. In a 1999 book Virtual Histories, Ferguson edited a collection of delightfully weird counterfactual hypotheses. One essay argued that if Mikhai
Source: Meet the Press
5-20-07
MR. RUSSERT: And we are back with “The Reagan Diaries.”
Historian Doug Brinkley, you are the editor. What is the importance of “The Reagan Diaries”?
MR. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Well, it’s Ronald Reagan in real time. It’s—every day he was president, he would grab these maroon volumes, eight and a half by 11, and handwrite what he felt that day. He’d usually write them before he went to bed in the White House, occasionally bring them on Air Force One, Marine One. So we get to r
Source: Press Release -- UCLA
5-18-07
Eugen Weber, an internationally renowned historian and former dean of UCLA's College of Letters and Science, died Thursday. He was 82.
A member of UCLA's faculty since 1956 and a prolific author, Weber wrote about French culture and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust, fascism, intellectual history, and many other subjects. He served as dean from 1977 to 1982 and held a UCLA endowed chair in modern European history, which is now na
Source: WSJ
5-19-07
Early this month, 71-year-old Philip Herzog gathered with his two brothers and several descendants in the spartan conference room of the family's kosher wine firm. A representative of the company's bank was coming to make a presentation -- not about the Herzogs' business, but about their family tree.
"Your family has a history of great tragedy, but also great joy," said Andy Anderson, the chief historian at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. Bringing out books and d
Source: NYT
5-19-07
Karen Hess, an American culinary historian who brought an academic rigor to the study of recipes, cooking techniques and ordinary American kitchen practices, died Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 88.
She died after suffering a stroke the week before, her son Peter Hess said.
Ms. Hess, known as a kind but combative personality, did not shrink from taking on the icons of American cookery, who she felt presented a false picture not only of the quality of American food and coo
Source: NewsHour (PBS)
5-17-07
JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, Judy Woodruff talks to Michael Beschloss about his new book on presidents.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Standing up for principle. Throughout the history of the United States, there have been moments when American presidents have stood for principles that were not popular at the time. Michael Beschloss, historian and NewsHour regular, looks at nine presidents in his new book, "Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989."
Source: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk
5-16-07
A HISTORY professor who wrote a best-selling book about Scotland was yesterday banned from the road for drink-driving.
Cops spotted Tom Devine's car swerving from lane to lane on the M8. He was doing just 40mph in a 70mph section in his Jaguar XJ8.
A court yesterday heard that Devine, 61, left, was more than twice the booze limit.
Devine is the Sir William Fraser chair of Scottish history at Edinburgh University - the top job in the field.
His
Source: CBS
5-16-07
The author of "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" is leaving the city where he chronicled storm survivors' tales. After 14 years in New Orleans, Douglas Brinkley has accepted a job at Rice University, where he will become a professor of history and fellow at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston.
Brinkley, who currently teaches at Tulane and has worked as a CBS News consultant, said he was enticed not only
