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: CBC News
1-23-06
The union representing professors and lecturers at the University of Prince Edward Island has condemned a part-time teacher's offer of a B-minus grade to students who agreed to stay away from his lectures.
David Weale said he made the offer because the class is too big and some students aren't interested in being there.
About 20 students, out of a class of about 100, accepted the guaranteed 70 per cent mark to drop out of the class.
Weale is a retired pr
Source: AP--Washington Times
1-23-06
At the end of a quarter-century spent chronicling the civil rights movement, Taylor Branch is admittedly relieved. But his voluminous research into Martin Luther King and his contemporaries has not diminished his opinion of King's historical stature.
Far from it.
Mr. Branch, in his third and final volume of a narrative history of the civil rights movement, titled "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years 1965-68," argues that King deserves to stand alongside
Source: Daniel Pipes in the NY Sun
1-24-06
William Blum, a Washington, D.C. writer, responded delightedly last Thursday on learning that Osama bin Laden had cited his book in an audiotape. Blum called the mention of Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower "almost as good as being an Oprah book," a reference to the popular American television host whose endorsement routinely makes a book a bestseller.
Asked if he was queasy about bin Laden's urging listeners to read his book, Blum replied: "I'm not
Source: Guardian (UK)
1-23-06
The discredited right-wing historian David Irving was arrested in Austria last year for denying the Holocaust and faces trial next month. From his Viennese prison, he gives his first interview to German author and academic Malte Herwig, who asks if arrogance is at the heart of Irving's desire for outrage - or something more sinister As darkness descends upon the thick walls of Vienna's ancient Josefstadt courthouse, the adjacent prison compound comes to life. Shouts and crie
Source: Christopher Reed in the Guardian
1-20-06
The awesome view of the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains in California, rearing up the eastern side with the contrast of the Alabama foothills below, kept nagging at the mind of the western film historian Dave Holland, who has died aged 70.
Eventually he realised he had seen the same formations on film, and more than once. One rock he noticed was in Gene Autry's cowboy classic Boots and Saddles (1937); it also marked the spot where the chase began in How the West Was Won (1962)
Source: Telegraph (UK)
1-20-06
PROFESSOR PHILIP GRIERSON, who died on January 15 aged 95, was a medieval historian, a leading numismatist, and a symbol of continuity at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he was a resident fellow for 70 years.
Grierson's teaching career was that of a general historian of medieval Europe, in particular the Carolingian Empire, though it was as a numismatist and expert on medieval coinage that he was most renowned. He held chairs in the subject at Cambridge and at Brussels
Source: Wa Po
1-21-06
Twenty-four hours after Osama bin Laden told the world that the American people should read the work of a little-known Washington historian, William Blum was still adjusting.
Blum, who at 72 is accustomed to laboring in relative left-wing obscurity, checked his emotions and pronounced himself shocked and, well, pleased.
"This is almost as good as being an Oprah book," he said yesterday between telephone calls from the world media and bites of a bagel. "
Source: Judy Stoffman in the Toronto Star
1-21-06
At an age when many people are basking in Florida retirement, Lita-Rose Betcherman can't stop writing.
Her fourth book of history, Court Lady and Country Wife: Two Noble Sisters in Seventeenth-Century England, has recently been published by Harper Collins in Canada, Morrow in the U.S., and Wiley in the U.K. to good reviews. British biographer Jane Dunn, author of Elizabeth & Mary, called it "popular history at its best."
Two more books she is not ready to
Source: Irish Times
1-21-06
Noam Chomsky's eighth-floor office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is sparse, cheaply furnished and gloomy, lightened only a little by a few giant plants and some pictures tacked to the walls, writes Denis Staunton.
The most prominent picture is a large black-and-white photograph of Bertrand Russell that stands on top of a filing cabinet just inside the door. Below it is a quotation from the British philosopher's autobiography: "Three passions, simple but ove
Source: Frontpagemag.com
1-20-06
On November 9, 2005, Professor Joan Wallach Scott appeared as a witness before the Select Committee on Academic Freedom of the Pennyslvania House of Representatives. The committee was created by House Resolution HR 177, sponsored by Representative Gibson Armstrong.
Joan Wallach Scott is a distinguished member of the academic profession as it is currently constituted. She holds a tenured chair – itself an honorific – in History at Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies, one of the
Source: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History
1-20-06
Librarian of Congress James H. Billington has appointed Louis Galambos to the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in American History and Ethics at the John W. Kluge Center, effective 1 January 2006. Galambos, a professor of history at the Johns Hopkins University, is the fourth recipient of the honor.
The holder of the Maguire Chair conducts research on ethical issues associated with American history. Research may include the conduct of politics and government at all levels of American life
Source: History Today
1-11-06
The annual Longman-History Today award for Book of the Year 2006 went to Matt Houlbrook for Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-57 (University of Chicago Press). History Today Editor Peter Furtado described it at the awards ceremony this week as “not a story of persecution, but a lucid, sane and fascinating account of how gay people negotiated space for themselves within a hostile cultural environment, dealing with policing, housing, geography, identity and politics.
Source: National Security Archive
1-19-06
Washington D.C., January 19, 2006 - A federal district judge's opinion last year ordering more secrecy for two almost 40-year-old CIA memos to President Johnson contradicted Supreme Court precedent and the plain language of the Freedom of Information Act, as well as time limits on presidential privilege set in the Presidential Records Act, according to the appeal filed yesterday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by University of California, Davis professor Larry Berman.
Source: NYT
1-18-06
What was George Washington's accent like? "The War That Made America," a four-part edutainment series that begins tonight on PBS, makes some guesses about that and hundreds of other lost historical details, as it chronicles the French and Indian War in high-gloss and ultimately successful re-creations. Possibly Washington sounded very American, with hard R's; possibly he sounded Irish-like; maybe he sounded British or southern or vaguely mid-Atlantic. The actor can't seem to decide. An
Source: Newsletter of the American Revolution Round Table
1-19-06
Tom Fleming got everyone's attention -- and then some -- when he revealed that the opening chapter of his latest book, Washington's Secret War The Hidden History of Valley Forge, was titled: "General George Washington: Loser." Today, Valley Forge is a national shrine. In December 1777, Tom said it looked more like a black hole into which the Revolution was about to disappear. As many as fifty men deserted in a single day, while dozens of officers submitted resignations at the same ruin
Source: Providence Journal
1-19-06
It was the second day of cross-examination of David Rosner, a key witness in the state's effort to prove that paint companies created a public nuisance by making and marketing lead-based paints two generations ago.A paint company lawyer barraged Columbia University historian David Rosner yesterday with documents showing that the federal government specified the use of lead-based paints on schools and other public buildings for much of the last century.
Law
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
1-18-06
In the late 1980s, a history professor from Marquette University named John William Rooney walked into the French National Archives in Paris and walked out with a copy of the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau, a woven paper with red wax seals and a green silk cord through which Napoleon Bonaparte agreed to give up the French empire and accept exile.
The opportunity to steal a major piece of history, Rooney said, was too tempting to pass up.
"If you were to stand in fron
Source: The Australian
1-19-06
IF "history is an argument", an aphorism plausibly attributed to Bob Carr, the former premier of NSW, then Keith Windschuttle can be relied on to drum up more of it in 2006.
Windschuttle ignited Australia's immensely entertaining history wars with his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land. This was a research-based critique of the work of academic historians. It effectively demolished their consensus that 19th-century European settl
Source: Andrew Cockburn in the Nation
1-30-06
The FBI was probably tapping Edward Said's phone right up to the day he died in September 2003. A year earlier, when he was already a very sick man, Said was scheduled to speak at an event at the Kopkind Colony's summer session near Guilford, Vermont. The morning of Friday, August 2, the day Said was due to arrive, the colony's John Scagliotti picked up the phone at the colony's old farmhouse and found it was dead. He went to a neighbor to report the fault.
"Within half an hou
Source: LAT
1-18-06
The year-old Bruin Alumni Assn. says its
"Exposing UCLA's Radical Professors" initiative takes aim at faculty "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant to the class topic."
The group's recent campaign has upset a number of targeted professors and triggered the resignation last weekend of Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, a prominent affirmative action opponent and former UCLA professor, fr
