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
12-21-06
David Irving, the British author who was released on probation after spending 13 months in prison for denying the Holocaust, returned to England on Thursday.
Vienna's highest court on Wednesday granted Irving's appeal and converted two-thirds of his sentence into probation. He had been imprisoned for 13 months.
The author, who has been indefinitely banned from Austria, spent the night in a detention center, said Willfried Kovarnik, head of Vienna's immigration police. H
Source: NPR (audio)
12-21-06
The Congressionally-funded Iraq Study Group report was unveiled recently with pomp and ceremony. But quietly, inside the Pentagon, the ISG report is widely regarded as unrealistic. A rival plan from the American Enterprise Institute provides its own prescription for Iraq, and is gaining traction in the Bush administration.
[The report was written in part by former West Point historian Robert Kagan. It recommends changing the strategy of the US in Iraq. Instead of focusing on traini
Source: Fred Barnes in an editorial in the Weekly Standard
12-25-06
Last Monday Bush was, at last, briefed on an actual plan for victory in Iraq, one that is likely to be implemented. Retired General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army, gave him a thumbnail sketch of it during a meeting of five outside experts at the White House. The president's reaction, according to a senior adviser, was "very positive." Authored by Keane and military expert Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the plan (which can be read at aei
Source: Mother Jones
12-19-06
Tom Engelhardt is that rare 62-year-old who can make people half his age feel old. And young. Old, because, well, if you've got the age advantage, how come he's the one with the all the vigor? Young, because his energy and enthusiasm and commitment are galvanizing—ask the hundreds of writers whose books he's edited over the years (Mike Davis, Adam Hochschild, Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky; the list goes on and on); or the journalism students he's taught and inspired; or, for that matter, just drop
Source: Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo
12-3-06
Three of the works of nonfiction that make my personal list of the year's best books, and one of the works of fiction, initially came to my attention because of a lifelong interest in race relations in the United States generally and in Southern history more specifically. These are matters about which I make no claims to virtue or moral purity, but they have been foremost in my mind ever since, as a boy of 9, I moved with my family from the Northeast to Southside Virginia. The sight of black con
Source: UPI
12-19-06
Turkish author Ipek Calislar was acquitted for allegedly insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, considered the founder of modern Turkey.
The BBC reported that prosecutors claimed Calislar had insulted Ataturk in a biography of Ataturk's wife Latife, in which Calislar reportedly wrote that Ataturk had once fled disguised as a woman.
Calislar faced up to four years in prison for violating Turkey's law against denigrating "Turkishness."
Source: Tristram Hunt in the Guardian reviewing Chris Wrigley's AJP Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe by
12-9-06
"I wondered whether you ever had an opening for a lively talker on current affairs in television. As you know, I can do very nicely in impromptu discussion; and if you are ever thinking of this sort of thing, I'd be grateful if you'd think of me. I realise it is a new trade, but I'm not too old to learn it." This letter from AJP Taylor - written in the hope of joining the panel show In the News - seems to embody everything we now know about the first "TV don". It is ambitious
Source: Deseret News
12-17-06
The first time he saw it, when he was 20, Howard Bloch was overwhelmed. The Bayeux Tapestry — perhaps the most famous textile in the world — is an exquisite 230-foot embroidered panorama dramatizing in words and images the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings between England and France, better known as the Norman Conquest of 1066. (During that time the Anglo-Saxon King Harold was killed by William the Conqueror of Normandy.)
Bloch, now a noted professor of French at Yale U
Source: http://www.bwog.net
12-15-06
Lieutenant Colonel Isaiah "Ike" Wilson, a visiting professor at SIPA on loan from West Point, has a more than academic understanding of the Iraq War, having studied it from both an historian's and a commissioned officer's perspective. Bwog editor Sara Vogel caught up with Wilson before class to talk about bad planning, doing better, and--of course--Fox News. Forget Baker-Hamilton--it's all here!
[Q.]What is your course here [Limited War and Low Intensity Conflict] about?
Source: http://jta.org
12-13-06
An Orthodox historian who published a book on Jewish anti-Zionism said he was prevented from giving a blessing from the bimah in Dublin’s main synagogue.
University of Montreal professor Yakov Rabkin, whose book “A Threat From Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism” charts the history of religious objections to Zionism, tried during Shabbat services Saturday to recite a thanksgiving blessing after crossing the ocean, but was stopped by two members of the congregation.
Source: http://www.sootoday.com
12-14-06
Michael Aakhus, the University of Southern Indiana's (USI) resident Maya expert, had low expectations for the authenticity of Mel Gibson’s latest film, Apocalypto.
After seeing the film, he said his expectations were met.
"If you like action films, you should enjoy it - but if you are going to learn history, stick to your books," Aakhus said.
Apocalypto, filmed on site in the Yucatec dialect, which Aakhus said is used in the northern section of
Source: http://www.theday.com
12-16-06
Documenting the crimes of the Soviet Union has been a project that Jonathan Brent has been preparing for all his life. Since 1995, Brent, associate director and editorial director of the Yale University Press, has headed an effort producing 20 books documenting mass murder, espionage, imprisonment of dissidents and other atrocities engineered by the Kremlin.
Anti-Communists during the Cold War, trying to rally the West against Moscow, long accused the Soviets of such outrages. But
Source: BBC
12-18-06
Queen's University professor Keith Jeffery will be given unprecedented access to the archives of the organisation, which was not even acknowledged to exist until just over a decade ago.
Earlier this year, the Secret Intelligence Service - popularly known as MI6 - launched its first public recruitment campaign and now even has its own website.
Last month, two serving agents gave their first ever media interviews to the BBC in an attempt to attract younger recruits to the
Source: AP
12-19-06
More than 100 Civil War historians have signed a letter to Pennsylvania's gambling regulators asking them to deny a license to a slot-machine casino proposed near the historic battlefield.
Calling it the second battle of Gettysburg, the letter comes as the state Gaming Control Board is expected to vote on license applicants Wednesday.
The slots parlor would be a mile-and-a-half from the border of the 6,000-acre Gettysburg National Military Park in southcentral Pennsylva
Source: Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the NYT
12-17-06
In his celebrated book “Of Paradise and Power,” Robert Kagan took issue with “the mistaken idea that the American founding generation was utopian, that it genuinely considered power politics ‘alien and repulsive’ and was simply unable to comprehend the importance of the power factor in foreign relations.” Those words might stand as one epigraph for his provocative and deeply absorbing new book. Another could be what a South African historian once said about a book of his own: although its pages
Source: Robert Sullivan in the NYT in a review of James McPherson's From Reconstruction to the Final Days of the American Frontier
12-17-06
Something else they don’t tell you in school is that life can be a lot like a textbook. It’s a slog mostly, and it’s tough to tell the difference between what’s important and what’s the Warren G. Harding administration. Currently, the teaching of the past for people in the middle school years relies heavily on the use of terms like “Shays’ Rebellion” and “checks and balances,” terms you memorize and explain. It’s history as checklist — which is what makes James M. McPherson’s “Into the West” see
Source: NYT
12-19-06
Last weekend's Book Review devoted most of its pages to recent books on war. To continue the discussion, NYTimes.com invited two foreign policy writers to join Barry Gewen, an editor at the Book Review, in a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges facing the U.S. in Iraq and beyond.
Max Boot, Dec. 19, 10:55 AM ET:
I should begin by expressing my skepticism about all arguments for historical inevitability. It is all too easy to argue that history could not have turned
Source: Informed Comment (Blog)
12-18-06
Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation carries the story of how Elliot Abrams and others at the National Security Council in Bush's White House have intervened to stop the publication of an op-ed in the New York Times by Flynt Leverett. Leverett himself served in the National Security Council until not so long ago.For Leverett's criticism of Bush admi
Source: NYT
12-17-06
Samuel Devons, a physicist and historian of science at Columbia University who combined research in nuclear physics with a career-long effort to make science accessible to general audiences, died on Dec. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92 and lived in Irvington, N.Y.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.
In the 1960s, while he was chairman of Columbia’s physics department, Dr. Devons and others conducted experiments that shed light on the nature of the atom’s
Source: NYT Book Review
12-17-06
... NIALL FERGUSON, professor of history at Harvard and author of “The War of the World.”
Vasily Grossman, “Life and Fate: A Novel” (1980). World War II’s “War and Peace.” Written (mainly) from the vantage point of a Soviet Jew, this masterpiece was judged far too ambivalent in its treatment of the “Great Patriotic War” to be published in the author’s lifetime.
Gert Ledig, “Payback” (1956). This harrowing journey to the end of the Third Reich’s night is a kind of antith
