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: Philadelphia Inquirer
12-6-05
... After 50 years of widespread economic devastation, unfathomable urban poverty, and racial strife, maybe leveling the place is Camden's best shot at survival after all.
Leave it to a historian to suggest a brighter future without implosion.
Howard Gillette Jr. didn't intend to depress, he insists as we chat about his bleak book at City Coffee downtown.
The Rutgers University-Camden professor mostly wanted to learn how Camden had come to be the eyesore th
Source: Tech Central Station
12-1-05
Nick Schulz: The title of your book is somewhat dry, but it's about an important development in human history. It's called, The Escape From Hunger and Premature Death: 1700 to 2100, and it tells an extraordinary story.
Can you tell us how you got interested in looking into this subject and what, broadly speaking, you discovered?
Robert Fogel: Well a group of other people in demography economics and the biomedical sciences and I began collaborating back in the mid-'70
Source: Baltimore Sun
12-5-05
James A. Rawley, 89, an author, professor and nationally known expert on race relations, died Tuesday in Lincoln, Neb., after suffering a stroke.
He moved to Lincoln in 1964 and taught at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He was an authority on the Civil War, Reconstruction and the history of race relations. The Organization of American Historians created the Rawley Prize for accomplished historians in the area of race relations.
His books include The Transatlantic Sl
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
12-5-05
The Japanese Supreme Court on Thursday rejected an appeal by a professor at the University of the Ryukyus, in Okinawa, seeking damages against the government for censorship of a textbook that he helped write in 1993. Observers see the ruling as upholding the education ministry's right to screen and alter textbooks.
The ministry's screening of textbooks aroused anti-Japanese rioting in China earlier this year after Japanese education officials released a list of approved textbooks t
Source: NYT
12-5-05
Howard B. Gotlieb, a Boston University archivist who cajoled, charmed, wheedled and - most effectively, he said - groveled to snare the papers of notables like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bette Davis, not to mention Fred Astaire's dancing shoes, died Thursday at a Boston hospital. He was 79.
The cause was complications of surgery, the university said.
Over four decades, Dr. Gotlieb gathered papers and artifacts from more than 2,000 American and European indi
Source: Greg James Robinson at Cliopatria blog
12-2-05
I have not been on the ball as much as I should this Fall, and I discovered that I had let a notable date slip past me. But then, so, I believe, did HNN’s editors. Nowhere in the last month weeks the Historians in the News Column pointed out that October 3, 2005 was Gore Vidal’s 80th birthday (see for example, Marc Cooper’s interview wiht Vidal in the November 7, 2005 THE NATION, “Gore Vidal, Octacontrarian” (Nation.)
At the risk
Source: National Coalition for History
12-1-05
The National Council on Public History (NCPH) has announced the appointment of John R. Dichtl as the organization’s new Executive Director. Dichtl has worked at the Organization of American Historians (OAH) since the early 1990s, and most recently served as the Deputy Executive Director. While working at OAH, he advanced a number of programming, strategic planning, and development efforts; worked to raise funds; and handled a wide-range of responsibilities, including staff-management, outreach,
Source: NYT Book Review
11-27-05
JOHN HOPE FRANKLIN is among a handful of scholars who have changed the way Americans view their past. It wasn't so long ago that mainstream histories of the United States ignored the experience of minorities or employed the sort of stereotypes that most readers today would find offensive. An African-American, raised and educated in an era of stifling race prejudice and legal segregation, Franklin, now 90 years old, has spent his career exposing the bigotry that once dominated American intellectu
Source: NYT
12-2-05
The National Security Agency has released hundreds of pages of long-secret documents on the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, which played a critical role in significantly expanding the American commitment to the Vietnam War.
The material, posted on the Internet overnight Wednesday, included one of the largest collections of secret intercepted communications ever made available. The most provocative document is a 2001 article in which an agency historian argued that the agency's intelli
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
12-2-05
Olive San Louie Anderson, a doctor's daughter from Ohio, entered the University of Michigan in 1871, one year after the Ann Arbor campus first admitted women. She was one of a tiny handful in a sea of men. When she graduated in 1875, she hoped to enter a profession, but she was thwarted — not only because of sexism but also because of her religious skepticism.
In 1878 Anderson published a fictionalized memoir titled An American Girl, and Her Four Years in a Boys' College. The book h
Source: Asia Times
11-23-05
[Dr Andrei Lankov is a lecturer in the faculty of Asian Studies, China and Korea Center, the Australian National University. He graduated from Leningrad State University with a PhD in Far Eastern history and China, with emphasis on Korea, and his thesis focused on factionalism in the Yi Dynasty. He has published books and articles on Korea and North Asia.]
It was a fine night in Pyongyang in mid-October
as I walked a deserted street under the unusually bright stars of the North Korean sk
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Walter Kidney was about 8 years old when an Ionic capital on the porch of a neighboring Oakland home caught his eye.
"I thought there must be such a thing as architecture," he said in a 2002 interview, recalling that he later noticed the colonnaded entrance to the Oakland Carnegie Library.
"At that point I knew that there was such a thing as architecture, and I really liked it."
It was the beginning of a lifelong passion for Mr. Kidney,
Source: The Guardian (London)
Jozef Garlinski, who has died aged 92, was a devoted anti-Nazi and eminent historian of wartime Poland. He was born in Kiev, making him a subject of the last Tsar of all the Russias. Most of his early childhood was spent on the run from the Russo-German battles fought on Polish soil during the first world war.
...
When the second world war began, with the German attack on Poland on September 1 1939, the 25-year-old Garlinski had just fallen in love with Eileen Short, a Dublin nurse
Source: The Guardian (London)
12-2-05
Austria's authorities were facing acute embarrassment yesterday after it emerged that the controversial historian David Irving had discovered two of his books inside the prison where he was held last month. Irving stumbled across copies of Hitler's War and Schlacht im Eismeer (Battle in the Arctic Sea) while browsing through the 6,400-volume library of Graz's prison, where he was taken after his arrest three weeks ago.
A delighted Irving asked warders if he could sign his own works.
Source: National Coalition for History
12-1-05
The National History Center’s last Congressional seminar series event for the year will be a presentation by Professor Maris Vinovskis on the history of the “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) program. Vinovskis’s presentation, entitled, “From a Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind: Federal Compensatory Education Policies from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush,” is co-sponsored with the House Humanities Caucus. The program will take place on Friday, 9 December 2005 from 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m. in the
Source: Democratic Voice of Burma
11-30-05
Burma’s outspoken, respected and renowned historian Dr. Than Tun, suddenly died from heart attack and breathing problems at his beloved History Department of Mandalay University in central Burma, in the early hours of 30 November.
He was more than 82 years old when he died, having just celebrated the 90th birthday of his close friend Ludhu Daw Amar at Taunglaylone (Four Mountains) Monastery of Reverend U Pannya, situated on Taungthaman Lake near Mandalay on the previous day.
Source: The Guardian (London)
11-30-05
In the summer of 1935, the American historian Gordon Craig, who has died aged 91, toured Germany with a group of Princeton undergraduates. His experiences with the Nazi regime, then just two years in power, began an engagement with the German question that would last for seven decades.
The trip also had a more immediate impact on Craig's future: a chance meeting with a Rhodes scholar led him to apply for a scholarship, which, much to his surprise, he won. He arrived at Balliol Colle
Source: Independent (UK)
11-27-05
David Irving's recent life has made him look more like an outlaw than an historian. Broke, shunned and declared "persona non grata" across half the planet, it's been quite a comedown for the world's most notorious Holocaust denier.
His latest comeuppance has been an episode as shabby as any and may force him to spend years in prison.His Viennese lawyer, Elmar Kresbach, insists he has changed his mind about "the views he is so famous f
Source: The Independent
11-29-05
[By Charles Glass]
'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.'
Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations General Assembly Resolution, 10 December 1948.
One of my first stories as a reporter for The Observer was a student strike in 1977 at the Lo
Source: The Guardian
11-29-05
Napoleon massacred more than 100,000 Caribbean slaves and should be remembered as a genocidal dictator and inspiration for Hitler rather than a military genius and founder of modern France, a French historian said yesterday.
"I refuse to bow down before the statue any longer, I have opened my eyes," said Claude Ribbe, a respected black academic and part of a governmental commission on human rights whose book, Napoleon's Crime, is published this week, on the bicentenary of
