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: dailypress.com
3-20-06
Ivor Noel Hume recalls the day in 1975 when Colonial Williamsburg President Carlisle Humelsine asked if he was doing anything interesting.
"I was a bit irritated at that," says Noel Hume in his characteristic forthright manner, "because I thought I was always doing something interesting."
And he was. CW's chief of archaeology and his staff had found something intriguing while digging on the grounds of the Carter's Grove plantation: evidence of a sett
Source: Press Release -- Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
3-20-06
The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) reports that Waskar Ari, an indigenous historian from Bolivia, was denied a visa to teach in the United States.
MERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE HUMAN RIGHTS ACTION NETWORK (AAASHRAN)
AYMARA HISTORIAN DENIED VISA
20 March 2006
Case number: bo0603_ari
ISSUES: Academic and scientific freedom; Right to travel
**Visit the AAASHRAN websit
Source: Campaign Website
3-20-06
Historian Allan Lichtman, running for the US Senate in the Maryland Democratic primary, has unveiled a new television ad that features him literally taking a plunge into a pond. He's fully clothed.
Accordng to his website:
"This humorous and edgy ad literally shows the difference between the minor ripple of conventional politics and the big splash that Allan will make in Washington. It will air for a week in Montgomery and Prince George's Counties and Baltimore C
Source: Tony Judt in the NY Review of Books
3-23-06
At first glance John Lewis Gaddis is the ideal person to write a general history of the cold war: he has already written six books on the same subject. His new book is based on a popular undergraduate course at Yale, where Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of History. To be sure, it is not clear in what precise respect this latest version is distinctively new—We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997) had a decidedly stronger claim.[1] But Gaddis, the "dean of cold war historian
Source: cronaca.com
3-17-06
JOHN WYMER was one of Britain’s foremost archaeologists. In the course of a lifetime devoted to seeking out the earliest traces of human beings, he made many significant discoveries in Britain and abroad.
John James Wymer was born in 1928 and brought up in southwest London, near Kew Gardens. He was introduced to the quest for ancient flint implements by his parents whom he accompanied on many visits to nearby gravel pits where flint implements and the bones of extinct animals were
Source: NYT
3-19-06
Madeleine Pelner Cosman, a prominent writer, scholar and lecturer whose passion for what she called the "glorious order" of the past led her first to a career in medieval and Renaissance studies and more recently to wide public advocacy of tougher immigration laws, died on March 2 in Escondido, Calif. She was 68.
The cause was complications of scleroderma, a chronic disease of the connective tissue, her family said. Ms. Cosman, who moved to California in the late 1990's, w
Source: Deborah Solomon interview in the NYT Magazine
3-12-06
Q: As a staunch neoconservative and the author of a new feminism-bashing book called ''Manliness,'' how are you treated by your fellow government professors at Harvard? Look, if I only consorted with conservatives, I would be by myself all the time.
So your generally left-leaning colleagues are willing to talk to you? People listen to me, but they don't pay attention to what I say. I should punch them out, but I don't.
In your latest book, you bemoan the disappearance
Source: 60 Minutes
3-12-06
[H.R.McMaster is the author of, Dereliction of Duty.]
This is a story about an entire city that was taken over by al Qaeda. It's called Tal Afar and about 200,000 people who live there became prisoners in their own homes when terrorists took control and turned it into their town.
They used Tal Afar as a base to train insurgents and launch attacks around Iraq. Last September, U.S. and Iraqi forces set out to recapture Tal Afar, and as Lara Logan reports, the Bush admini
Source: Hiram Hover (blogger)
3-16-06
Has He Even Read the Book? No, and he can’t spell “Bailyn” either. Bradford Short rants about Sean Wilentz receiving the Bancroft for The Rise of American Democracy.
UPDATE: Much Heat, Still No Light: In a comment on Bradford Short's post linked above, Richard Snow, editor of American Heritage, airs an old grudge against Wilentz, who had some unkind things to say about that magazine in TNR five years ago. Okay
Source: Jewish Press
3-16-06
[Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book "The Scout" is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.]
In the campaign in the UK to organize an academic boycottof Israeli universities, led by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT), it turned out that University of Haifa faculty member Ilan Pappe was the driving force, seeking to create a boycott of his own university. Tha
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
3-16-06
To the Editor:
Re "Drop Out of the College" (editorial, March 14):
Having written in favor of Electoral College reform since 2000, I, too, would prefer the popular election of the president. But the gimmick you endorse, of having individual states bind their electors to vote for the national popular-vote winner, seems problematic for one basic reason.
What is to stop state legislatures with strong partisan loyalties of their own from abandoning su
Source: NYT
3-16-06
The American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal court in New York for a preliminary order to stop the administration from banning a prominent Swiss Muslim scholar from speaking in the United States.
The scholar, Tariq Ramadan, has been barred from this country since his visa was revoked in July 2004, a week before he was scheduled to begin a job at the University of Notre Dame. Administration officials explained the action by citing a USA Patriot Act ban of foreigners who "e
Source: NYT
3-15-06
Mr. Swanson, a constitutional law expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research institute, has satisfied his decades-long fixation [with the assassination of Lincoln he read about as a boy in a partial newspaper clipping] — by finishing the story himself. His book, "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer," was published last month by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, just in time for Lincoln's (and Mr. Swanson's) birthday.
The author's pass
Source: Inside Higher Education
3-15-06
Columbia University on Tuesday announced the 2006 winners of the Bancroft Prizes — one of the top honors in the field of history. The winners are Erskine Clarke, a professor of American religious history at Columbia Theological Seminary, in Georgia, for Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (Yale University Press); Odd Arne Westad, a professor of history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, for The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time (Cambridge U
Source: Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
12-31-69
"America at the Crossroads" serves up a powerful indictment of the Bush administration's war in Iraq and the role that neoconservative ideas — concerning preventive war, benevolent hegemony and unilateral action — played in shaping the decision to go to war, its implementation and its aftermath. These arguments are made all the more devastating by the fact that the author, Francis Fukuyama, was once a star neoconservative theorist himself, who studied with or was associated with leadin
Source: Peter Gottschalk in an email circulating on the Internet
3-13-06
[Peter Gottschalk is Associate Professor, Wesleyan University.]
Wikipedia.org has been usurped to impugn specific scholars and Hindu
studies in the US in general, omitting the far larger context of the
work by both individuals and the scholarly community. In particular,
Wikipedia's entry on Wendy Doniger defines and rejects her work almost
entirely within a frame of hurt Hindu sensibilities, an entry on Jeff
Kripal defines him only in regard to allegations and controversy
surr
Source: WaPo
3-13-06
Donelson Hoopes, 73, a museum official and art historian who was a leading authority on 19th-century American painting, died Feb. 22 at a hospital in Bangor, Maine, from the effects of a stroke. He lived in Steuben, Maine.Mr. Hoopes, the author of more than a dozen books, worked at museums across the country and was the curator of exhibitions and collections at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from 1962 until 1964, when the Corcoran was one of the two or three most prominent muse
Source: Inside Higher Education
3-13-06
Miguel Tinker-Salas, a professor of Latin American history at Pomona College, had two unexpected guests during his office hours on Tuesday.
Mixed in with the line of about five students were two detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, one of whom, according to a business card he gave Tinker-Salas, works for the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a Federal Bureau of Investigation collaboration with local detectives. According to Tinker-Salas, the detectives said they wa
Source: Trenton Times
3-12-06
These are not the best of times for liberals, but Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz cautions those pessimists who fear that conservatives are about to make good on their crusade to erase more than half a century of progressive reforms that date back to FDR's New Deal.
Wilentz, who is director of Princeton's Program in American Studies, agrees that President Bush has had more success in turning back the liberal agendas of the past than previous conservative Republican pres
Source: Lisa Hirschmann in the Columbia Spectator
3-9-06
DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein addressed Columbians in Roone Arledge Auditorium Wednesday night on what he deemed a "contrived and fabricated controversy" surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hundreds of students, professors, administrators, and non-affiliates poured into the auditorium to hear the controversial author's speech, titled "Israel and Palestine: Misuse of Anti-Semitism, Abuse of History." The event was sponsored by a
