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: Deseret News (Utah)
3-22-07
Anyone who refers to the past as a simpler time is speaking nonsense.
"There was no simpler time," historian David McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner, said Tuesday.
Imagine if you were Abigail Adams getting up at 5 a.m., waking up the hired girl, raising the children and educating them at home because the schools were closed in the midst of war in 1776.
Then there was disease and coping with it. Teet
Source: http://www.southernillinoisan.com
3-23-07
A historian of Central Intelligence Agency operations will speak at Southern Illinois University Carbondale about the agency’s development and use of psychological torture.
Alfred W. McCoy is scheduled to give a free, public lecture Tuesday, April 3 in the Hiram Lesar Law Building on the SIUC campus. His speech is based on McCoy’s 2006 book, “A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, From the Cold War to the War on Terror.”
McCoy’s position is that torture, even a “no-t
Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk
3-25-07
American historian Chalmers Johnson believes that “our numerous clandestine activities, some of which are almost totally disreputable, will come back to haunt us.”
In an interview with Mark Karlin put out by the news and opinion site Alter-Net, Chalmers quotes political philosopher Hannah Arendt who argued that at the root of all imperialism, there has to be a racist view. He maintains that the US does not have a withdrawal strategy from Iraq because it does not intend to leave. He
Source: http://media.www.thestute.com
3-23-07
Amy Srebnick, author and historian, kicked off the inaugural Women's History Month lecture at Stevens Institute of Technology. Srebnick started by presenting her book, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in the Nineteenth-Century New York. The author read excerpts from her book and spoke about the development of modern society along with the relevance of her work to gender issues today.
The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in the Nineteenth-Century N
Source: Martin Sieff at the website of the American Conservative
3-12-07
[Martin Sieff is national security correspondent for United Press International. He has reported from more than 60 countries, covered seven guerrilla wars and ethnic conflicts and been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.]
Historical surveys of war and the way technological developments change the way it is fought are common—from the tours de force of major military historians like Martin Van Creveld and William O’Neill to potboilers marketed to
Source: Daily Show
3-23-07
Click on the SOURCE link above to watch Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
On the clip she agrees with Jon Stewart that former UN Ambassador John Bolton misstated Abe Lincoln's record as president.
Source: AP
3-23-07
Mel Gibson exchanged angry words with a university professor who challenged the accuracy of his film "Apocalypto" at an on-campus screening.
Gibson was answering questions from the crowd at California State University, Northridge, Thursday night when Alicia Estrada, an assistant professor of Central American studies, accused the actor-director of misrepresenting the Mayan culture in the movie.
Gibson directed an expletive at the woman, who was removed from the
Source: Fredericksburg (Va.) Free Lance-Star
3-24-07
If you've always wanted to get to know Thomas Jefferson, Dodd Auditorium was the place to be this week.
For there, in the University of Mary Washington's George Washington Hall, Daniel P. Jordan delivered the world's fastest crash course in Jefferson.
Jordan, a historian who has been the executive director of Monticello since 1985, knows his subject well enough to poke a little fun at the founding father.
He recalled the visitor to Jefferson's mountaintop
Source: AP
3-23-07
ROME -- British historian David Irving, who was jailed in Austria for questioning the Holocaust, visited the Auschwitz death camp and renewed his claim that there was no proof it had gas chambers during an Italian TV program aired Friday.
In the Sky TG24 documentary program "Controcorrente" (Countercurrent), Irving is filmed walking down the remains of railroad tracks in the former death camp in southern Poland as he insists that engineering techniques back his claims that
Source: Altercation (blog) (Click on the SOURCE link to see embedded links in this excerpt)
3-23-07
A few final (I hope) notes about Mr. Klein:
Some points for the record:
1) Just this week, alone, Klein has referred to me as: "obsessed," "still-obsessed," "futile and pathetic," and "still pathetic," "still after [him]," "a suck-up" and "intellectually dishonest," "not reliable," and full of "non-stop crap." I have not called Klein a single name this week, or to my knowledge, eve
Source: A review in the Times Literary Supplement of a new transaltion of Foucault's HISTORY OF MADNESS Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (Routledge)
3-21-07
History of Madness is the book that launched Michel Foucault’s career as one of the most prominent intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. It was not his first book; that was a much briefer volume, Maladie mentale et personnalité, that had appeared seven years earlier, in 1954, in the aftermath of a bout of depression and a suicide attempt. (A translation of the second edition of that treatise would appear in English in 1976, in spite of Foucault’s vociferous objections.) But
Source: http://www.pm.gov.uk
3-22-07
TV historian Simon Schama came to Number 10 for the latest in a series of podcast conversations with Tony Blair.
He and the PM enjoyed a fascinating discussion about history, a subject Mr Blair says he wishes he had studied at university, rather than law.
This year sees several notable anniversaries - 300 years since the Act of Union between England and Scotland, 200 years since the abolition of slavery, 50 years since the signing of the Treaty of Rome, and 25 years sin
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
3-21-07
Mae Timbimboo Parry, a Shoshone chief's great-granddaughter who helped correct history's account of the Bear River Massacre, has died.
Parry, 87, suffered from Parkinsons disease for several years, and her family had been preparing for her death, said a niece, Patty Timbimboo-Madsen.
Nonetheless, her passing leaves the family without its matron and the Northwest Band of the Shoshone without one of its clearest voices for historical accuracy.
Source: Correspondence published on the website of the New Republic
3-23-07
John Prados:
I am obliged to object Ronald Radosh's March 12 piece, "Bohemian Rhapsody." Radosh inaccurately represents the background of a conference, "Alger Hiss and History," that is being held at New York University on April 5. He charges that the conference is biased because scholars who believe Hiss was a Soviet agent are not represented--and uses that assertion to indict an NYU institute.
When I was invited to participate in this conference, I
Source: Website of the National Endowment for the Humanities
3-22-07
Harvey Mansfield, one of America's leading political scientists and a widely published author, will deliver the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced today. The annual NEH-sponsored Jefferson Lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
"With a distinguished career of thoughtful-and thought-provoking-discourse on political theory a
Source: Daily Show
3-19-07
To watch click on the SOURCE link above.
Source: Newsday
3-21-07
The Theodore Roosevelt Association has chosen the head of the Atlanta History Center as its new president with the intention of creating a world-class museum and research facility dedicated to the 26th president.
James Bruns, who has run the Atlanta museum for four years after serving as the Smithsonian Institution's development director and founding director of its National Postal Museum in Washington, will begin work full time with the TRA July 1 but will be involved in associatio
Source: Reuters
3-21-07
DAKAR, Senegal -- The best way Europeans and Americans can make reparations for their past role in the slave trade is to end unfair trade policies that keep Africans shackled in poverty, a U.S. historian said.
Adam Hochschild, whose 2005 work "Bury the Chains" charts the anti-slavery movement that led Britain to abolish the trade 200 years ago this Sunday, said more global campaigns were needed to end many forms of injustice persisting in the world.
In an e-ma
Source: NY Sun Editorial
3-22-07
Long after world communism and its American variant have been discredited, a strange effort to resurrect its memory and glamorize its "heroes" is taking place both at New York University and the Museum of the City of New York. A glimpse of the museum exhibit is provided on our page one today by Ronald Radosh. And NYU, in conjunction with the Tamiment Institute, once an educational force for the anti-Communist left wing of the 1930s, has announced a slew of programs under the auspices o
Source: NYT
3-21-07
The conversations between President Bill Clinton and the historian Taylor Branch were long and late, sometimes stretching until 2 a.m., and always in secret. For eight years, at Mr. Clinton’s urging, they met in a second-floor office in the family quarters of the White House, Mr. Branch scribbling notes and a tape recorder running.
Those sessions, nearly 80 in all, are the fodder for a new book by Mr. Branch, tentatively titled “Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes,” that Simon
