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: AHA Blog
5-17-07
On April 27-28, 2007, the New-York Historical Society held its annual Weekend with History gala event. This two-day program of informal conversations and presentations featured some of America’s leading historians, like Eric Foner, Kenneth T. Jackson, and Sean Wilentz among others, as well as media figures like Cokie Roberts and Lesley Stahl. In a ceremony on the 27th, City University of New York Professor David Nasaw was named the society’s American Historian Laureate.
Nasaw was al
Source: Mark Stood Lawrence in the NYT Book Review
5-13-07
... “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power” makes a valuable contribution to the study of American policy making during the turbulent years from 1969 through 1974. Partly, it does this by transcending the stale polemics that have surrounded the study of Nixon and Kissinger. But its more significant, if not wholly convincing, achievement is to connect the unevenness of their policy-making performance with the ups and downs of their peculiar personalities. “The careers of both Nixon and Kissinger
Source: NYT
5-17-07
[On May 17, 2007 Forbes suspended publication of American Heritage (the website remains in operation). Richard Snow is the editor.]
... Mr. Snow, 59, went to work in the American Heritage mailroom in 1965, when Columbia University insisted he take a little time off, and joined the staff full time when he finally graduated, in 1970. He has been there ever since, and in 1990 he became the magazine’s sixth editor, succeeding Byron Dobell.
Either he was a perfect fit to be
Source: Economist
5-17-07
[HNN Editor: Each week the Economist runs just a single obituary. This week it was for Chandler.]
TODAY'S business leaders are voracious consumers of management advice. They are forever calling in the consultants and surfing the business press for the next big thing. So here is a free tip. Get off the whirligig of management fads. Forget about “long tails” and “wikinomics” for a while and do something old-fashioned. Sit down with a handful of books—admittedly rather fat books—and
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
5-17-07
[Leon Fink is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.]
... Though reviewers of book manuscripts customarily receive an honorarium, the routine work of journal reviewers regularly goes unrewarded, as well as unrecognized by the outside world. In both cases, the satisfaction of the peer reviewer comes mostly from recognition as an expert in the field and from intimate association with a crea
Source: Campus Watch
5-17-07
Stanford Middle East history professor and former president of the Middle East Studies Association Joel Beinin is known for letting his one-sided political perspectives invade the classroom. As former Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein told The Jewish Weekly of Northern California in 2002,"It's said that Joel Beinin doesn't believe in balance as an intrins
Source: Reuters
5-16-07
CHICAGO -- American original Studs Terkel, the author and oral historian who for decades gave a voice to working men and women, turned 95 on Wednesday. But don't worry about his memory. He's sharp as a tack.
In fact, he's the one doing the worrying -- about what he describes as the memory loss of a country he suggests may be more interested in the transgressions of celebrities than more substantive affairs such as the politics of the Bush administration, which he characterizes as a"burlesq
Source: Gary Kamiya at Salon.com
5-8-07
Sir Alistair Horne may be the only author in the world whose books have been read and praised by George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon and Robert Fisk. Not to mention by much of the senior military staff of the U.S. Army, Middle East scholars, State Department policy wonks, and realpolitik statesmen. The distinguished British historian, author of 18 books, became the talk of the U.S. chattering classes when it was revealed that President Bush was reading his classic account of the 1954-1962 Algerian War,
Source: NYT
5-6-07
THE question trails Robert Caro like a fly, buzzing in his ear. Over and over, at cocktail parties and museum receptions in the past few years, he hears variations on the same query.
“Doesn’t New York need a new master builder?” people ask. “Don’t we need a new Robert Moses?”
Mr. Caro, 71, sits in his spare writer’s aerie high in a Midtown office building, an owlish man with a faint smile. His answer has the virtue of concision:
No.
Mr. Caro, a
12-31-69
Thomas Fleming was elected president of the Society of American Historians at the organization’s annual dinner at the Harvard Club on May 7, succeeding Eric Foner of Columbia University The Society’s membership includes both academic historians and professional writers of American history such as Mr. Fleming. The SAH was founded in 1939 by Allan Nevins and several fellow historians to promote literary distinction in the writing of history and biography. Membership is by invitation only and
Source: Informed Comment (Blog)
5-12-07
[Shaul Bakhash teaches history at George Mason University. His wife is Haleh Esfandiari.]
May 11, 2007
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Pasteur Ave
Tehran 13168-43311
Iran
Your Excellency,
I am writing on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our dismay over the harassment and subsequent detention of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Mid
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
5-10-07
The proposed panel seemed like a perfect pitch at a time when scholars in many fields are studying postcolonial identity and diaspora communities. The idea was to have scholars who study different regions and time periods examine issues of collective memory and identity in post-World War II Germany, modern Pakistan, and Japanese diaspora communities.
The program committee for the next annual meeting for the American Historical Association liked the idea, too. There was just one litt
Source: Press Release -- Harvard Business School
5-11-07
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Business School historian who founded the field of business history, died on Wednesday, May 9, at Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., at the age of 88. In his long and legendary career, he chronicled and analyzed big businesses around the globe in a prolific and extraordinarily influential corpus of books and articles. At the time of his death, he was the School’s Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus.
Source: UC Berkeley News
5-8-07
A high-spirited multi-generational crowd — bearing camera phones, hot-flash hand fans, and balloons scrawled with messages of affection — packed Wheeler Auditorium Monday morning for one last Leon Litwack lecture.
"He's got a great narrative style" and a "compelling story," noted Branden Little, a former graduate-student assistant to Professor Litwack among the sea of undergrads, press photographers, family members, former students, and garden-variety well-wisher
Source: Scrapbook in the Weekly Standard
5-14-07
The accidental death of David Halberstam, onetime war correspondent and author of The Best and the Brightest (1972), has inspired the sort of mournful, sometimes impassioned, obituary language reserved for deceased journalists. THE SCRAPBOOK, in its wisdom, looks upon this as a form of professional courtesy: Only among journalists, after all, is the death of a journalist a national calamity.
Yet Halberstam's demise has yielded an unexpected chief mourner: Democratic foreign policy g
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
5-13-07
Stanley A. Karnow:
Withdraw now
Karnow is a veteran Time-Life journalist who covered U.S. combat in Vietnam from 1959 and wrote "Vietnam: A History."...
Mark Moyar:
Be wary of withdrawing
Moyar is a scholar at the U.S. Marine Corps University at Quantico, Va., who wrote "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-1965."...
Robert K. Brigham:
Negotiate with neighbors
Brigham is a professor of history and internati
Source: Press Release -- defendthehonor
5-11-07
AUSTIN, Texas - This week's announcement that Ken Burns has reached a general "understanding" with two Latino organizations to include the Latino WWII perspective in his upcoming 14-hour documentary may represent a step forward, but, the Defend the Honor Campaign, notes, significant questions remain. The Defend The Honor Campaign has released a letter (see below) they sent to Paula Kerger, President and CEO of PBS, requesting sufficient details about the proposed changes to the film to
Source: Steven Clemons in the Washington Note
5-14-07
Boston University Professor Andrew J. Bacevich is a brave, thoughtful public intellectual who has tried -- in reserved, serious terms -- to challenge the legitimacy of the Iraq War. He has been one of the most articulate leading thinkers among military-policy dissident conservatives who have exposed the inanity of this war and the damage it has done. He authored the critically-acclaimed book,
Source: Scrapbook in the Weekly Standard
5-21-07
THE SCRAPBOOK admits it: Sometimes things just fall into our lap, or across our desk, that we couldn't possibly invent. A case in point is this week's announcement that publisher Andre Schiffrin, founder of the New Press, will be celebrating "oral historian" Studs Terkel's 95th birthday on Wednesday, May 16, with a series of fun-filled suggestions on his corporate website.
The literary life just doesn't get any better than this. Admirers of Studs are encouraged to gather i
Source: USA Today
5-15-07
... "This was a private library that saw itself as a Republican institution, and its programming reflected that. This will change," says Timothy Naftali, 45, the University of Virginia historian who will become federal director of the [Nixon] library this summer or fall, when the National Archives is to accept the institution into the presidential libraries system under a 2004 law.
When the archives and the Nixon foundation asked Naftali to apply for the library post, he i
