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: Britannica Blog
3-2-07
Arthur Schlesinger was truly the country’s premier American historian. I considered him a friend of mine for almost all of my forty-six years in Columbia’s history department. I recall with pleasure correspondence with him when he was in the White House. It was glorious of him that he showed respect for and deep interest in other historians he admired who did not have his origins and opportunities in pursuing their careers. I felt flattered and honored by Arthur when he invited me to do a bi
Source: Jewish Press
2-28-07
[Steven Plaut, a frequent contributor to The Jewish Press, is a
professor at Haifa University. His book"The Scout" is available
at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at www.stevenplaut@yahoo.com.]
By now just about everyone in the Jewish world has heard about the
blood libel affair that has emerged from Bar Ilan University in
Israel. It involves a professor of history there, Ariel Toaff, who claims
that Jews used gentile blood for ritual purposes in Italy
in the Middle Ages.
Source: NYT
3-4-07
[Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.]
With the death last week of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at 89, America lost its last great public historian. The notion may sound strange, given the appetite, as voracious as at any time in recent memory, for serious works of history, and in particular the vogue for lengthy, often massively detailed biographies of the founders and of presidents.
But Mr. Schlesinger performed a different function. He stood at the forefront
Source: Sean Wilentz in the Guardian
3-1-07
I knew that one day I'd be reading in the paper about Arthur's death, but never really believed it. He was too intensely, happily alive - too energetic. The consummate New Yorker, he was a man about town even as he began to fail physically in the final months. Those of us who were lucky enough to share his incandescence are sad today, but also bewildered. We truly will not ever see his likes again.
He was an extraordinary historian both as narrator and interpreter. A scholar is cons
Source: National Review
3-2-07
I always regretted that we didn’t become friends, because the thousands who succeeded in doing so found friendship with Arthur Schlesinger very rewarding. For one thing, to behold him — listen to him, observe him, read him — was to co-exist with a miracle of sorts. It is an awful pity, as one reflects on it, that nature is given to endowing the wrong men with extraordinary productivity. If you laid out the published works of John Kenneth Galbraith and of Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., the line of
Source: WaPo
3-2-07
... To a nation, he was a compass point. Adore him or disagree with him, he spoke with a historian's worldview. The architects of the war in Iraq, he told C-SPAN in an interview that will be aired on Saturday, "do not know enough history, and they duplicated the stupidity of the Vietnam War."
At lunch, he said he was planning to write the second volume of his autobiography. Yesterday, a spokesman for the publisher of the first part, Houghton Mifflin, said that as far as sh
Source: Vernon Horn at the AHA blog
3-2-07
Arthur M. Schlesinger jr., one of the most distinguished historians of the 20th and 21st centuries and a life member of the AHA, died of a heart attack last night in Manhattan. He was 89. During his academic career, Schlesinger taught at Harvard University and the City University of New York. He also worked extensively outside of the academy. During World War II he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner to the CIA, and later on, he served as an advisor and speechwriter to Pres
Source: Slate
3-1-07
[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out:Presidential DoodlesandCalvin Coolidge.]
The first meeting I ever attended of
Source: Commentary
3-1-07
Norman Podhoretz
There are three things to say about the work of Arthur Schlesinger, who has just died at the age of eighty-nine: (1) He was an exceptionally good writer, commanding a lucid, vivid, and often elegant prose style. (2) He was an exceptionally bad historian: incapable of doing justice to any idea with which he disagreed, and so tendentious that he invariably denigrated and/or vilified anyone who had ever espoused any such idea. Like the so-called “Whig interpretation of h
Source: American Heritage
2-1-92
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., twice winner of a Pulitzer Prize, is an eminent and productive American historian; he is also a well-known liberal with a long-standing weakness for intervening in contentious public debates. It was presumably in the first capacity that he was invited to join the commission set up to review New York State’s social studies curriculum. It was in the second capacity that he wrote a strong dissent from the commission’s report. Subsequently Schlesinger set forth his views of
Source: Robert B. Semple, Jr. in a signed editorial in the NYT
3-2-07
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. could be blunt. The worst he would say about George W. Bush in the early going was that he was “an amiable mediocrity.” But it did not take long for President Bush to fall close to the very bottom of Mr. Schlesinger’s not inconsiderable list of bad presidents — in large part because he had committed the one mistake that a great historian could not abide, which was to wantonly ignore the experience of history.
Mr. Schlesinger died on Wednesday night at the age
Source: Jonathan Zimmerman in the Chicago Tribune
3-2-07
I met Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once, about 10 years ago, at his
apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. I knocked on the door and
Schlesinger opened it, dressed simply in a shirt and slacks.
"Dr. Schlesinger, you're not wearing your bow tie!" I exclaimed.
Schlesinger laughed. The tie was a central part of this great
historian's public persona: On television or in the newspaper, he never
appeared without it. Look at any obituary for Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
who died of a hear
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3-2-07
An associate professor of history at Kent State University who wrote an article three years ago that some people saw as glorifying a suicide bomber is again at the center of controversy, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. The professor, Julio Pino, and the university have received hate mail and threats after an article that linked Mr. Pino to an extremist Islamic Web site began circulating on the blogosphere. A university spokesman said that Mr. Pino had no connection to the extremist site. He
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
3-2-07
On March 1, 2007, in a ceremony held in the U.S. Capitol, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) received the Organization of American Historian’s prestigious “Friend of History” Award from OAH Executive Director Lee Formwalt. Senator Byrd has a long record of supporting history and one of his most lasting contributions has been his sponsorship of the “Teaching American History” grants program awarded by the U.S. Department of Education. The goal of this program for school districts and institutions with
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
3-2-07
On March 1, 2007, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s
Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and the National Archives held
a hearing to consider presidential records, specifically the impact
Executive Order (E.O.) 13233 has had on the disposition of those
materials. The E.O. was issued in November 2001 by President George W.
Bush, and gives not only current and former presidents, but also vice
presidents and a former president's family, t
Source: Daniel Johnson at the blog Contentions (Commentary Mag.)
3-2-07
No myth about George W. Bush has been cultivated more sedulously by his enemies than the idea that he has never read anything—that he is too ignorant to be the leader of the West. Of course, the same myth was created about Reagan, but the Teflon president had the natural ebullience to remain indifferent and undamaged in public esteem. Bush is more vulnerable.
Yet the accusation is even less warranted in his case than it was in Reagan’s. Last Wednesday the British historian Andrew Ro
Source: Elizabeth Redden at the website of Inside Higher Ed
3-2-07
Legislation introduced in Congress Thursday would nullify an executive order signed by President Bush in 2001 limiting public access to presidential documents and greatly expanding the scope of executive privilege. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) announced the bipartisan bill during a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing that featured widespread condemnation of the president’s action, not only for its perceived effect of restricting research and freezing the flow of public information,
Source: http://www.mysanantonio.com
2-18-07
Flip to the index of an American history book and chances are you'll find myriad references to the American Revolution.
There's also a chance you won't find much about the contributions of Texans, the Spanish or Bernardo de Gálvez to the success of the colonial American troops.
Fresh from Laredo's celebration of George Washington's birthday, two groups of historians gathered Sunday to talk about advances they are making in raising the awareness of the Hispanic contribution to
Source: WaPo
2-22-07
Frank M. Snowden Jr., 95, a Howard University classicist for almost 50 years whose research into blacks in ancient Greece and Rome opened a new field of study, died Feb. 18 at the Grand Oaks assisted living home in Washington. He had congestive heart failure.
As a black man, Dr. Snowden was a rarity in classics, but ancient history consumed him since his youth as a prize-winning student at the Boston Latin School and later at Harvard University. His body of work led to a National Hu
Source: Providence Journal
2-27-07
In a dramatic setback for three corporations convicted of creating a public nuisance by selling lead-based paints generations ago in Rhode Island, Superior Court Judge Michael A. Silverstein yesterday rejected every plea and motion from the companies to retry or throw out the case.
Instead, Silverstein said he would soon appoint a special master to oversee the removal of lead paint from houses in Rhode Island — a job the state has estimated could cost $1.37 billion to $3.74 billion.
