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: Independent (UK)
12-9-06
The thing about the historian David Starkey - and God, he's going to absolutely hate me for saying this (he does have his reputation for being rude and a brute to think of) - is that he is just such a dream date. We had a terrific evening, or at least I did. I probably bored the arse off him, poor fellow, but he didn't bore me for a minute and there was champagne and wine and I got quite tipsy, although only in the most professional way, and then it was a lift home in his Daimler with its luxuri
Source: CBS News
12-11-06
... If the struggle between gun rights and gun control advocates seems as eternal as the battle between lions and hyenas, it is. At least, in America. In a solid new book: “A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America," Ohio State University history professor Saul Cornell argues that “the original understanding of the Second Amendment was neither an individual right of self-defense nor a collective right of the states, but rather a civic right tha
Source: NYT
12-10-06
MAYFLOWER
A Story of Courage, Community, and War.
Nathaniel Philbrick. Viking, $29.95.
This absorbing history of the Plymouth Colony is a model of revisionism. Philbrick impressively recreates the pilgrims' dismal 1620 voyage, bringing to life passengers and crew, and then relates the events of the settlement and its first contacts with the native inhabitants of Massachusetts. Most striking are the parallels he subtly draws with the present, particularly in his accou
Source: Christian Probasco at Newwest.net
12-5-06
HNN EDITOR'S NOTE: on 12/9/06 We received the following email:
My name is Courtney Lowery and I am the managing editor of New West.Net.
I'm writing to request you remove an article ("Patricia Nelson Limerick: A
fictional interview") you posted in its entirety from New West.Net on Dec.
5. (http://hnn.us/roundup/14.html#top)
The post came from a writer who runs his own blog on New West.Net and it has
been removed from our pages because it was in violation of our pol
Source: NYT
12-9-06
Robert Rosenblum, an influential and irreverent art historian and museum curator known for his research on subjects ranging from Picasso to images of dogs, died on Wednesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 79.
He died from complications of colon cancer, said his wife, the artist Jane Kaplowitz.
For half a century, Mr. Rosenblum taught in the undergraduate and graduate art history divisions at New York University, where he occupied an endowed chair as professor
Source: NYT
12-7-06
An adviser to former President Jimmy Carter and onetime executive director of the Carter Center has publicly parted ways with his former boss, citing concerns with the accuracy and integrity of Mr. Carter’s latest book, “Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.”
The adviser, Kenneth W. Stein, a professor of Middle Eastern history and political science at Emory University, resigned his position as a fellow with the Carter Center on Tuesday, ending a 23-year association with the institution.
Source: European Jewish Press
12-6-06
The British Jewish community has expressed its concern after it was revealed that a leader of a controversial Muslim group sent funds and letters of support to convicted Holocaust denier David Irving.
Asghar Bukhari, a founder member of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC), last month admitted sending the letters to Irving during the year 2000.
Irving, who has been imprisoned in Austria since September 2006 for for having denied the existence of gas chambers in
Source: FrontpageMag.com
12-8-06
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990, and editor, with William Kristol, of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He is the author of the n
Source: WaPo
12-1-06
The Bush administration is deliberating whether to abandon U.S. reconciliation efforts with Sunni insurgents and instead give priority to Shiites and Kurds, who won elections and now dominate the government, according to U.S. officials.
The proposal, put forward by the State Department as part of a crash White House review of Iraq policy, follows an assessment that the ambitious U.S. outreach to Sunni dissidents has failed. U.S. officials are increasingly concerned that their reconc
Source: NYT
12-7-06
For some years now a theatrical troupe called the Reduced Shakespeare Company has made its living performing all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in just over an hour and a half. It’s a highbrow joke. In “Civilization,” Roger Osborne speeds through more than 40,000 years of Western history in just under 500 pages, minus bibliography and index. This is definitely not a joke, although it comes close to being a stunt, an intellectual high-wire act that the author pulls off with deceptive ease.
Source: NYT
12-8-06
George B. Tindall, a noted historian of the American South, died on Saturday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 85.
The cause was complications of diabetes, his daughter, Blair Tindall, said.
At his death, Professor Tindall was Kenan professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he had taught for more than 30 years.
Professor Tindall was known in particular for his work on the rise of the New South in the first h
Source: AP
12-7-06
President Bush on Thursday announced the recipients of this year's Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.
Those to be honored at a White House ceremony on Dec. 15 [include] ...
Paul Johnson. The historian and journalist is being honored for writings that have ''captivated and educated people around the world.''...
David McCullough. The noted author and historian is considered a foremost expert on the American presidency.
Source: Press Release-- NPS
11-28-06
Connecticut’s deputy state historic preservation officer J. Paul Loether joins the National Park Service (NPS) in January as Chief of the National Register of Historic Places and National Historic Landmarks Division. The Register and Landmarks Division are part of the NPS Historical Documentation Programs, Cultural Resources. Mr. Loether begins his NPS service on Jan. 22, 2007.
“Mr. Loether brings a lifetime of historic preservation experience in Connecticut to benefit these nationa
Source: Barton A. Myers at the website of H-CivilWar
12-6-06
[Barton A. Myers, Department of History, University
of Georgia.]
Review of The Civil War: A Concise Account by a Noted Southern
Historian. Abilene: McWhiney Foundation Press, 2005. 142 pp. Maps, index.
$12.95 (paper), ISBN 1-893114-49-X.
In just 137 pages of text, esteemed Civil War scholar Grady McWhiney
presents his succinct narrative of the nation's most important historical
event. McWhiney's final work offers readers a fast-paced yet factually
packed history of the coming of
Source: Bob Tyrrell in the Jewish World Review
12-7-06
[Mr. Tyrrell is editor in chief of The American Spectator.]
[HNN Editor: Recently in the Wa Po Eric Foner opined that President Bush is the worst of the chief executives in US history: Pierce, Buchanan, A. Johnson, Harding, Coolidge and Nixon.]
... Onto this junk heap of inferior presidents he now heaves George W. Bush. Note, nowhere at "the bottom rung" does he place Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Carter blundered both in foreign policy and in economic polic
Source: Gary Kamiya at Salon.com
12-6-06
Edward Said's"Orientalism" was a cultural bombshell that
has become a landmark -- some would say a crater. One of the most popular
and influential academic books ever written, it inspires condemnation and
praise in equal measure. Published
in 1978,"Orientalism" not only was a founding text for the academic
fields of postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, but also remains one
of the most-cited works in what we can broadly call the"oppositional
canon." It has been translated into 36 la
Source: http://www.newsobserver.com
12-1-06
For a book whose publisher worried it might be perceived as a religious work, "Blood Done Sign My Name" has done particularly well among church and Sunday school groups. Now it has won a prestigious religion award.
Author Timothy Tyson said he nearly fell over when he got a phone call earlier this week with the news that he had won the 2007 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion, a $200,000 international cash prize. The award is given jointly by the University of Louisville and
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog, where comments are posted)
12-3-06
The University of South Carolina's Dan Carter sends word that our mentor, George B. Tindall of UNC, died early yesterday morning in Chapel Hill at 85. George was a giant in his generation of historians of the post-Civil War South. There were Comer Vann Woodward, John Hope Franklin, and George Brown Tindall. Franklin, alone, survives. Before it was fashionable, they understood that Southern history had to be done in both black and white. For all of his accomplishments, George was a remarkably mod
Source: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/
12-3-06
Papiya Ghosh, a noted historian and professor of Patna University, who was working hard to restore Bihar's image and academia, was brutally stabbed to death along with her maid in what police said was a robbery-related murder.
Police said Ghosh's home in an upscale Patna neighbourhood, barely 100 metres from the Pataliputra police station and a stone's throw from home commissioner Afzal Amanullah's house, was ransacked and valuables, including a computer, were stolen.
Source: http://www.courier-journal.com
12-2-06
In the summer of 2005, Thomas Dionysius Clark, Kentucky's historian laureate for life, himself passed into history, aged 101. And now his memoirs, meticulously prepared, have appeared in a hefty volume, with a particularly helpful foreword and introduction. The former is by Charles P. Roland, emeritus professor of history at the University of Kentucky, and the latter by James C. Klotter, state historian of Kentucky. Both knew Clark quite well, and they manage in very short compass to include bri
