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: NYT
2-25-07
A LITTLE over a century ago, Henry Roe Cloud, born in 1884 on the Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) reservation in Nebraska, enrolled at Yale, becoming the university’s first American Indian graduate in 1910. Today, American Indians make up 1 percent of Yale’s student body, matching their share of America’s population.
A little over a year ago, Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, a Tuscarora from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in New York, became Yale’s first American Indian faculty member whose teaching is ent
Source: John Lewis Gaddis in the NYT Book Review
2-25-07
“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind,” Neil Armstrong said — or meant to say — when he set foot on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969. Richard Nixon, who had become president of the United States six months earlier, called it “the greatest week in the history of the world since the creation,” thereby inadvertently irritating the faithful among several of the world’s greatest religions.
Even as he was celebrating that triumph, the new chief executive and
Source: Josh Mathew at BWOG (Bwog is compiled by the staff of The Blue and White, Columbia University's undergraduate magazine.)
2-18-07
After making my way past the numerous activists handing out fliers condemning the war in Iraq and the U.S.'s conceivable Iranian escapades, I grabbed a seat in one of the old wooden pews of St. Mary's Episcopal Church on 126th in Harlem.
After recognizing a few familiar faces amongst this unusual congregation, I saw sitting up at the altar Dr. Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University, and his cospeaker Dr. Tanya Rein
Source: NYT
2-25-07
For Muslims and non-Muslims alike, the stock image of an Islamic scholar is a gray-bearded man. Women tend to be seen as the subjects of Islamic law rather than its shapers. And while some opportunities for religious education do exist for women — the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo has a women’s college, for example, and there are girls’ madrasas and female study groups in mosques and private homes — cultural barriers prevent most women in the Islamic world from pursuing such studies.
Source: Press Release -- UM
2-24-07
OXFORD, Miss. Winthrop Jordan, 75, professor emeritus of
history and African-American studies at the University of
Mississippi, died at his home Friday (Feb. 23) after a long
illness. He was a Quaker and a member of the Oxford Friends
meeting.
Jordan won four national prizes in 1968-69 for his book
"White Over Black: American Attitudes Towards the Negro,
1550-1812," including the Society of American Historians'
Parkman Prize
Source: Evan Thomas in a two-page spread in Newsweek
2-26-07
A new book assessing the Anglo-American alliance picks up where Churchill's 'A History of the English-Speaking Peoples' left off.
***
The last time the United States and Britain threatened to go to war against each other was in 1895. As European powers raced to expand their empires, Britain coveted a mineral-rich slice of Venezuela along the border of its colony British Guiana. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine, President Grover Cleveland vowed to "resist by every means
Source: http://www.yerkir.am
2-22-07
YEREVAN (YERKIR) - For the first ever an Armenian historian has accepted Turkey's thesis of collaborative study, PanARMENIAN.Net reported.
As reported by Sabah newspaper, Ara Sarafyan, one of the most important historians of the Armenian Diaspora and the editor of Blue Book accepted the suggestion of the chairman of the Turkish History Institution, Halaco?lu, to carry out a collaborative study.
It's worth noting that Armenian President Robert Kocharian stated that norm
Source: http://www.ahora.cu
2-22-07
British historian Asa Briggs said Thursday that Cuba’s nearly half a century resistance to US hostility is a major and admirable political act that deserves humankind’s respect.
"It is admirable that it has been able to confront the United States," Briggs told reporters during a brief visit to Cuba, where he arrived on a cruise ship.
He told Prensa Latina that the best part of his voyage was to visit Cuba for the second time. The first was in 1983. You don’t n
Source: Tucson Citizen
2-23-07
"Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history." - Carter Godwin Woodson, Ph.D. (1875-1950)
Black History Month was founded to celebrate the culture and accomplishments of African-Americans.
Carter Godwin Woodson, the distinguished author, editor, publisher and historian, is known as the father of black history. In addition to writing many scholarly books
Source: Telegraph (UK)
2-23-07
T E Lawrence could in future be known as "Lawrence of Judea" instead of "Lawrence of Arabia" after a distinguished British historian claimed that he privately supported the idea of a Jewish state in the Holy Land.
While feted as an Arabist who supported independence of Arab states, Lawrence in fact regarded Arabs with a "sort of contempt", said Sir Martin Gilbert, the official biographer of Churchill.
Sir Martin said Lawrence believed fully
Source: Email to HNN from Max Holland
2-22-07
23 February 2007
Robert E. Casey, Jr.
Special Agent in Charge
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Dallas Field Office
One Justice Way
Dallas, Texas 75220
Dear Mr. Casey,
I am a journalist and author, currently writing a history of the Warren Commission for the New York publisher Alfred A. Knopf.
In the long process of writing this book, I have written several articles on aspects of President Kennedy’s
Source: Press Release -- Sweet Briar College
2-22-07
Thomas Jefferson’s clan was not just dysfunctional, there were “some seriously twisted people in that family,” she says.
Kierner will present a lecture, “Martha Jefferson Randolph: Virginian,” at 8 p.m. Thursday, March 1 in Memorial Chapel at Sweet Briar College. She will discuss Randolph, who had captured her interest while she was researching her 2004 book, “Scandal at Bizarre: Rumor and Reputation in Jefferson’s America.”
Randolph appeared to the historian – at least
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
2-22-07
[HNN Editor: Last week the Chronicle published a brief article on Toaff. This week brought a more extended discussion. This excerpt lists the main new details.]
Mr. Toaff's initial public statements varied widely as the controversy played out. In an interview with the newspaper La Stampa two days before the book's release, he claimed that the trauma of persecution in the Middle Ages had instilled "some fringe
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
2-22-07
To explore the hazards of refusing to eat in response to a negative tenure decision, The Chronicle spoke to an academic hunger striker of years past.
...
Ralph E. Luker is a retired, well-known historian of the civil-rights movement and a member of the prominent group blog Cliopatria, part of George Mason University's History News Network Web site. Thirteen years ago, he was a man on the verge of losing his academic career. Mr. Luker engaged in a hunger strike when his bid f
Source: LAT
2-21-07
U.S. and Iraqi forces have moved aggressively in the last week to combat Sunni Arab insurgents in neighborhoods across the capital and to establish a stronger presence in religiously mixed districts long plagued by sectarian violence.
But as the new security crackdown enters a second week, they face their most sensitive challenge: whether, when and how to move into the Shiite-dominated slum of Sadr City, stronghold of the Al Mahdi militia....
Any new move into Sadr City
Source: Press Release -- Washington College
2-22-07
In commemoration of George Washington’s birthday, Washington College has announced three finalists for the 2007 George Washington Book Prize.
The $50,000 award – co-sponsored by Washington College, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and Historic Mount Vernon -- is the largest prize nationwide for a book on early American history, and one of the largest for nonfiction.
The finalists are A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (Hol
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
2-21-07
When he saw the letter, Donny George Youkhanna knew it was time to get out of Iraq.
It was late this July, and someone had dropped an envelope containing a bullet on his parents' driveway in Baghdad. The writers threatened to kidnap and behead Mr. George's teenage son, Martin. They knew that the boy's father worked with the Americans, they wrote, and they accused the boy, a Christian like his father, of teasing Muslim girls.
It was too much. Within a few days, Mr. Georg
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
2-21-07
A female professor at the University of Toledo has resigned and four male professors are filing a complaint following a recent report that said the university’s history department was hostile to women, according to The Independent Collegian, the campus’s student newspaper.
The report said that women in the department called it “toxic” an
Source: Inside Higher Ed
2-20-07
[Eric Rauchway is professor of history at the University of California at Davis, and the author most recently of Blessed Among Nations: How the World Made America, soon available in a Hill & Wang paperback. If you want to see him attempt the online scholarly discourse described here, you might have a look at Open University.]
Thrift, piety, and guilt conspire to give me good environmentalist habits. I bicycle to work every day. I periodically walk around our house, turning off l
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
2-19-07
In the stratified world of higher education's most elite institutions, where professional jealousies abound, Drew Gilpin Faust appears to have achieved the seemingly impossible. She is a career academic who has risen to the top job at Harvard University while apparently making no enemies along the way.
"I truly have known her for 20 years, and I have yet to meet anyone who dislikes her," says Lynn Hunt, a professor of history at the University of California at Los Angeles.
