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
Aug 7, 2013
Robert N. Bellah, a distinguished sociologist of religion who sought nothing less than to map the American soul, in both the sacred and secular senses of the word, died on July 30 in Oakland, Calif. He was 86.His death, from complications of recent heart surgery, was announced by the University of California, Berkeley, where he was the Elliott professor emeritus of sociology.Throughout his work, Professor Bellah was concerned with the ways in which faith shapes, and is shaped by, American civic life. He was widely credited with helping usher the study of religion — a historically marginalized subject in the social sciences — into the sociological fold.“Modern America has a soul, not only a body, and Bellah probed that soul more deeply and subtly than anyone in his field or his time,” Steven M. Tipton, a professor in the Candler School of Theology at Emory University, wrote in an e-mail on Monday....
Source: WaPo
Aug 7, 2013
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — After a tragedy like the Trayvon Martin killing, calls routinely arise for a conversation about race.But Henry Louis Gates thinks the more direct way for structural change is through schools and their curriculum.That’s what he’s hoping will happen with “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross,” a six-hour PBS documentary series that traces 500 years of black history.“To tell the whole sweep of African-American history — no one’s tried to do that. That was what we were crazy enough to do,” Gates said in an interview on Wednesday....
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Aug 7, 2013
A master’s degree in teaching costs about $6,400 a semester for a full-time North Carolina resident attending East Carolina University’s College of Education, meaning a four-semester program would cost about $26,000. But, according to the North Carolina state legislature, that doesn’t mean it’s worth anything.In the most recent state budget passed by the state legislature and signed by the governor last week, North Carolina lawmakers eliminated a provision – which exists in many states – that granted automatic pay raises to public school teachers who completed master’s degrees. It was one of several changes the budget made to teacher compensation and working conditions, including ending teacher tenure, but it is the one likely to have the largest impact on the state’s higher education institutions.The elimination of the benefit could have a significant effect on enrollment in education schools at North Carolina colleges and universities. And since many of those programs generate net revenues for the institutions, enrollment declines could affect their bottom lines....
Source: HNN staff
Aug 7, 2013
Bob Filner, the embattled mayor of San Diego who faces allegations of sexual harassment and abuse, taught in the history department at San Diego State University for over twenty years before running for Congress in 1993.
Filner, who was born in Pittsburgh, received his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Science and Politics in England, 1930-1945: The Social Relations of Science Movement,” was completed under the supervision of L. Pearce Williams in 1973. He was employed as a historian of science by San Diego State from 1970 until his election to Congress in 1993.
HNN filed a public records request at SDSU for Filner's employment records, but we were informed that all employment files at that university are purged after ten years.
Source: Leicester Mercury (UK)
Aug 6, 2013
Historian Dr John Ashdown-Hill claims he has been airbrushed out of the city's Richard III story, despite making one of the project's pivotal discoveries.On Monday, February 4, the University of Leicester announced to an astonished world's press that it had identified the Greyfriars remains as those of King Richard III.Academics explained how the skeleton's DNA matched with that of Canadian furniture maker, Michael Ibsen - who had been proven to be the monarch's 16th great grandnephew....
Source: Deadline Detroit
Aug 6, 2013
"On The Media," National Public Radio's weekly show, took on the way journalists and other commentators have used Detroit's bankruptcy to draw a larger picture of what is wrong with the country -- often with an ideological bent that suits their own purposes. "Pundits and pontificators have seized on the moment to lay blame on their favorite targets and reductively declare that what ails Detroit is a microcosm of what ails America," said co-host Bob Garfield, who interviewed Northwestern University history professor Kevin Boyle on the most recent show.Boyle, who grew up on Detroit's East Side and attended the University of Detroit and received his master's degree and Ph.D from the University of Michigan, is the author of "Arc of Justice," the award-winning 2004 book about the Ossian Sweet case and Detroit in the 1920s, when, as he wrote, Detroit experienced explosive growth and the whole city seemed to function as one, huge, automobile-producing machine....
Source: International Business Times
Aug 6, 2013
Controversial historian David Irving is to hold a talk on SS chief Heinrich Himmler later this month.Irving, who has served time in jail in Austria for holocaust denial, will address audiences in Newcastle Upon Tyne and then Edinburgh, Scotland, on 27 and 28 August.Promotional material for the talks on Irving's website includes the 75-year-old visiting Himmler's field headquarters and also the home in which the prominent Nazi died. The events are likely to draw protests from far-left groups which call Irving a Nazi sympathiser for comments he made about the genocide of Jews by the Nazi regime during World War II....
Source: Asahi Shimbum
Aug 6, 2013
HIROSHIMA--An American professor living in Hiroshima is getting the young descendants of hydrogen and atomic bomb survivors to tell their stories, as well as linking victims of nuclear weapons and accidents around the world, to prevent future tragedies.Robert Jacobs, 53, an associate professor of the history of nuclear weapons and scientific technology at Hiroshima City University, settled near the city’s Mitakidera temple seven years ago. The old temple is well known for offering water of the falls on its grounds to the annual Peace Memorial Ceremony, held on Aug. 6 to commemorate victims of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima.Jacobs has interviewed a number of people at nuclear testing sites and in areas affected by nuclear accidents all over the world....
Source: WSJ
Aug 5, 2013
Military historian Victor Davis Hanson discusses his latest book "The Savior Generals" with Peter Robinson. Hanson identifies the shared characteristics of generals throughout history who saved wars deemed "lost." "Uncommon Knowledge" is produced by the Hoover Institution.
Source: CBS News
Aug 5, 2013
Now, a new book claims Monroe actually called first lady Jacqueline Kennedy to talk about it.
Source: Gulf News
Aug 4, 2013
London: The historian Mary Beard has become the latest woman to receive a tweeted bomb threat, sent on the eve of a boycott by many of Twitter in protest at its slow response to dealing with violent and obscene threats.Although many stayed off the site, the hashtags #Twittersilence and #connectwithrespect were trending, with many comments like David Howell’s: “Time spent enjoying @wmarybeard on twitter is time well spend. Time saved by ignoring idiots is time well saved,” and others pointing out that both women and men have been the victims of vitriolic abuse....
Source: MSN News
Aug 2, 2013
Ben Urwand has apparently done what no historian has previously been able to do: Draw not just one but many substantial links between 1930s Hollywood and the Nazi Germany regime of Adolf Hitler.Urwand's revelations were first revealed in a June issue of online monthly Tablet. According to The New York Times, "that the German government meddled in the film industry during Hollywood's so-called golden age has long been known to film historians ... But Mr. Urwand, 35, offers the most stinging take by far, drawing on material from German and American archives to argue that the relationship between Hollywood and the Third Reich ran much deeper — and went on much longer — than any scholar has so far suggested."...
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Aug 1, 2013
Not every scholarly study of early Christianity rockets to best-seller status thanks to an attack by a belligerent cable-network reporter.But that became the fate last week of Reza Aslan's Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, just out from Random House in the United States while, in Britain, the Westbourne Press is rushing the book forward from its original August 18 publication date.The fortunes of Zealot offer a cautionary tale for scholars who publish on touchy subjects—or perhaps a primer on how to provoke conservative-media hostility, and then to capitalize on it, even if you're no religious or intellectual radical....
Source: The Daily Reflector
Aug 1, 2013
Whatever happens in the next decade or two, East Carolina University professor Michael Gross said he did not want to look back and think he failed to stand up for something.A professor of German history with degrees from the University of Chicago, Columbia and Brown, Gross teaches his students about the effects of “fanatical, right-wing radicalism” and its effect on Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s.“One of the things we talk about is the responsibility we have to participate and protect democracy by speaking up,” Gross said. “If we don’t, it may very well collapse and be replaced by hypocrisy or a minority group that dictates its will. We’re in danger of letting others undermine our republic if we don’t educate ourselves.”...
Source: LA Times
Jul 31, 2013
Historian Brenda E. Stevenson (pictured in her UCLA office, with an African sculpture) mostly writes about the long-gone — 18th and 19th century African Americans, and the lives of enslaved women. Then came the case that made history while L.A. watched: Korean-born shopkeeper Soon Ja Du killed black teenager Latasha Harlins over a bottle of orange juice. A jury convicted Du of voluntary manslaughter, but she was sentenced only to probation and community service.Stevenson's new book, "The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins," analyzes the other "no justice, no peace" case that echoes through the 1992 riots and into the present day.Thirteen days after the Rodney King beating, Harlins was shot and killed. Where were you when all of this happened?
Source: Irish Independent
Jul 30, 2013
THE abolition of the Seanad is a "grubby power grab" by a Government that already keeps major economic decision-making within a powerful inner circle, historian Diarmaid Ferriter has claimed.In strident criticisms of the Coalition, Prof Ferriter also said the Economic Management Council (EMC) – the powerful four-member committee that decides all major economic decisions – showed "centralisation and unaccountable elites still dominate" even more than ever.His comments come after Emily O'Reilly, who will soon leave her Ombudsman post to become EU Ombudsman, criticised the Dail for not taking itself seriously, saying it spends its time "ducking and diving"....
Source: NZ Herald
Jul 30, 2013
Maori culture has been cheapened, the haka has become a corrupted spectacle and Maori tourism villages are degrading, according to one of the country's leading historians.Paul Moon's criticisms come in his latest book, Encounters: The Creation of New Zealand, where the Auckland University of Technology academic takes a look at the changing New Zealand identity over the last couple of centuries.Speaking on Firstline this morning, Dr Moon said it was about time someone took aim at the version of Maori culture we – and especially the tourism industry – present to the world."For a long time, we've had a snap-frozen version of Maori culture that's been around since the late 19th century," he says....
Source: The Age (AU)
Jul 30, 2013
Remote tribes in Indonesian Papua and the Amazon are at grave risk of genocide and it is happening now in Syria and the Sudan, despite the world saying ''never again''.So says a genocide expert, Yale University history professor Ben Kiernan. Papuan tribes - more than 40 regarded as ''uncontacted'' - faced genocide by the Indonesian military, he said. ''Not enough is known about what is happening in Papua, but lots of refugees are fleeing,'' he said.In Papua, Brazil, Ecuador and Peru indigenous people faced deforestation, disease and violent confrontation. Although only the violence could be called genocide, diseases brought by ranching and logging often could not be called accidental....
Source: openDemocracy
Jul 29, 2013
Giuseppe Acconcia: Professor Beinin, we are told that the Muslim Brothers have been abandoned by the armed forces to foster a government more engaged in the defense of social justice, as requested by millions of protesters, is this true?Joel Beinin: To be sure the army is aware that with this economic crisis, with rising prices and the fall in the import of wheat, the Egyptian people’s social rights have to be addressed. I would not say that the new government looks likely to follow this path. The prime minister Hazim Beblawi is a man of the centre and his government arises out of an agreement between the youth movements, the liberal party al-Dostour, led by Mohammed el-Baradei, and the Nasserists, supporting Hamdin Sabbahi: it is not a leftist coalition....
Source: ITV
Jul 29, 2013
Television historian and Cambridge professor Mary Beard has forced a Twitter troll to apologise after publicly naming and shaming him.The male Twitter user had sent an obscene message to Professor Beard that she then retweeted to her 42,000 followers, saying she was "not going to be terrorised."...
