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: AHA Today
Apr 3, 2013
Declaring that "access to health care is a basic human right," the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has issued a statement calling on colleges and universities to comply with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and to calculate the hours of part-time and adjunct faculty in a fair and accurate way. Such calculations would take into account the full responsibilities of these faculty for grading, advising students, and so forth, and not just the hours they spend in the classroom. The AAUP is responding to news accounts of a few institutions that have threatened to cut the course loads of non-tenure track faculty in order to avoid offering them health benefits- a move the AAUP terms "reprehensible."
Source: World Socialist Web Site
Apr 3, 2013
Allen Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, where he serves as director of the Civil War Era Studies Program. He is the author of numerous books, including Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President and Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America and Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Guelzo spoke with Tom Mackaman of the World Socialist Web Site in his office at Gettysburg College on a Saturday morning in March. A large academic conference was being held that weekend at the college entitled “The Future of Civil War History.” Gettysburg, in southeastern Pennsylvania, was the location of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War, and the city’s college is now one of the leading centers in the study of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.Tom Mackaman: How did you come about your interest in Lincoln and the Civil War?
Source: Economic Times (India)
Apr 3, 2013
There's a fortune to be made in an old pair of jeans. The only caveat (and it's a big one) is that the pair has to be really old; over a century is a good starting point. If you do have access to great-great-grandad's wardrobe (and assuming he wore jeans), the old pair could sell for close to $150,000. Lynn Downey, brand historian of Levi's travels the world with just such a pair; quite literally one of the first branded blue jeans ever made. She ensures the jeans are always part of hand luggage; this is one item of clothing that cannot be trusted with airlines. The other pair she's exhibiting is a 501 from the 1980s. What it lacks in vintage pedigree, this pair from Japan makes up for by sporting the signatures of all the members of The Rolling Stones....Brand historians or archivists are quite popular among American brands with a long pedigree. They are (or have been) present at Coca-Cola, Disney, Ford, Hallmark and Wells Fargo. And yet, according to Downey, having a brand historian shouldn't just be the preserve of older brands: "The day you start your business is the day you start your archive. I hope Google have an archivist because they are making history."...
Source: Daily Show (click for video)
Apr 2, 2013
Jonathan Sperber discusses Karl Marx's colorful personal life, and speculates as to how Marx would view the capitalist modern world.
Source: AP
Apr 2, 2013
BOWIE, Md. — Scholars will discuss the impact of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and message during a free public conference at Bowie State University.Friday’s inaugural conference commemorates the 45th anniversary of King’s assassination, which took place on April 4, 1968 in Memphis....
Source: Media Matters
Apr 1, 2013
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Robert Caro criticized conservative media coverage of President Obama during an appearance in New York City, describing it as "something quite horrible" and venomous.Caro, known for his biographies of President Lyndon Johnson, spoke during a March 29 interview at Strand Books in Manhattan conducted by New York magazine writer Frank Rich as part of promotion for the paperback version of his fourth Johnson book, The Passage of Power....
Source: Chicago Tribune
Mar 31, 2013
Dr. Hannelore Loevy Taschini, a pediatric dentist who taught for more than four decades at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Dentistry, was also a dental historian, editor and author."She was a nationally recognized historian of the dental profession who preserved the history of women in our profession for posterity," Bruce Graham, the school's dean, said in a statement....
Source: Donnellan Family Funeral Services
Mar 31, 2013
Noted American political historian/biographer and former Historian of the U.S. House of Representatives Robert V. Remini of Wilmette IL passed away on March 28 due to complications from a recently suffered stroke. He was 91.Dr. Remini was born in 1921 in New York City, the son of the late William Remini and Lauretta Tierney Remini. He was the older brother of the late Vincent and William Remini. After graduating from Fordham University, he served as a Lieutenant in the U.S Navy in the Atlantic during WWII before returning to New York to obtain his Masters and Doctorate in History from Columbia University. During these studies in 1948, he married his kindergarten friend and classmate Ruth Kuhner, who passed away in 2012. Together they were the proud parents of Elizabeth Nielson of Eugene OR, Joan Costello of Cincinnati OH, and Robert W Remini of Wilmette IL, as well as grandparents to Caitlin and Brian Costello and Grace Nielson.
Source: Global Times (China)
Mar 28, 2013
The Diaoyu Islands, although uninhabited, have long been the source of tensions between China and Japan, since both claim sovereignty over the islands. The two countries' relationship has often been strained by this dispute, which has intensified in recent years. Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has reiterated that "the Diaoyu Island and its affiliated islands have been China's sacred territory since ancient times" and has presented its historical and legal case to back its claim. This is a rare example, however, of a Japanese historian coming to the same conclusion. The late Kiyoshi Inoue was a Japanese academic, historian, author and professor emeritus at Kyoto University. He published Diaoyu Islands - The Historical Treaties in 1972, in which he presented his interpretation of why the Diaoyu Islands belong to China. This book was first issued by Daisan Shokan, a Japanese publisher. Against the currently escalating tensions on the islands, New Star Press reprinted this book in February....
Source: SF Appeal
Mar 27, 2013
The organization that oversees San Francisco’s de Young and Legion of Honor museums today announced it has appointed a New York-based art historian as its new director.Colin Bailey will be the new director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, overseeing 550 employees at the two museums in Golden Gate Park and Lincoln Park.Bailey, who most recently served as deputy director at The Frick Collection in New York City, will take over effective June 1, said Dede Wilsey, president of the Fine Art Museums’ board of trustees....
Source: AHA Today
Mar 27, 2013
On March 20, 2013, the United States Senate approved an amendment offered by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) to the Continuing Appropriations Act of 2013, which would restrict the use of federal funds in the National Science Foundation’s Political Science Program. In response, the Council of the American Historical Association approved the following statement of concern:The American Historical Association vigorously opposes the recent Senate appropriations amendment restricting National Science Foundation funding for research in political science to specific topics. The amendment, which requires the agency to limit funding to projects which it can certify “as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States,” is wrong-headed in many ways.First, the amendment represents an intrusion by politicians into the well-established and generally successful peer-review process by which the agency reviews grant applications. Peer review ensures that grant decisions are made by individuals with the necessary expertise through a reliable, widely accepted, process which minimizes bias. Imposing even innocuous-sounding political criteria for research compromises the autonomy that is necessary for intellectual progress—the first responsibility of the National Science Foundation.
Source: WaPo
Mar 27, 2013
ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. — Inside a Catholic convent deep in St. Augustine’s historic district, stacks of centuries-old, sepia-toned papers offer clues to what life was like for early residents of the nation’s oldest permanently occupied city.These parish documents date back to 1594, and they record the births, deaths, marriages and baptisms of the people who lived in St. Augustine from that time through the mid-1700s. They’re the earliest written documents from any region of the United States, according to J. Michael Francis, a history professor at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg.Francis and some of his graduate students in the Florida Studies department have spent the past several months digitizing the more than 6,000 fragile pages to ensure the contents last beyond the paper’s deterioration.
Source: The Health/PAC Digital Archive
Mar 27, 2013
Before there was an internet, with blogs, listservs and web pages to turn to, there was the Health/PAC Bulletin, the hard-hitting and muckraking journal of health activism and health care system analyses and critiques. A new web site, www.healthpacbulletin.org, is a complete and searchable digital collection of Health/PAC’s influential publication, which was published from 1968 through 1993. Health/PAC staffers and authors in New York City and briefly, a West Coast office in San Francisco, wrote and spoke to health activists across the country on every issue from free clinics to women’s health struggles to health worker organizing to environmental justice. Health/PAC both reported on what was going on and reflected back on a wide variety of strategies and tactics to build a more just health care system – a conversation that continues today.
Source: Estonian Public Broadcasting
Mar 25, 2013
Jaak Valge, a well-known historian and Tallinn University researcher, says that Estonians today are worse off than in the 1930s in comparison to the rest of the continent.“If the current Estonia is more than two times poorer than Finland, then before [World War II] Finland was a quarter wealthier. While Portugal is presently richer than Estonia, Estonians were far more wealthy in the 1930s than the Portuguese, “ said Valge, speaking on ETV on Sunday....
Source: NYT
Mar 25, 2013
A DECADE AGO, the Library of Congress paid $10 million to acquire the only known original copy of a 1507 world map that has been called “the birth certificate of America.” The large map, a masterpiece of woodblock printing, has been a star attraction at the library ever since and the object of revived scholarly fascination about the earliest cartography of the New World. The research has also rescued from obscurity a little-known Renaissance man, the 16th-century globe maker Johannes Schöner, who was responsible for saving the map for posterity.Five years ago, John W. Hessler, a historian of cartography at the library, published “The Naming of America,” an account of the map’s importance in post-Ptolemy geography, its disappearance for centuries and its rediscovery in a castle near the Black Forest in southwestern Germany. Now, Dr. Hessler has dug deeper into the dynamic of the years between Columbus, in 1492, and Copernicus, in 1543. Science and exploration were stretching minds to distant horizons, once unknown. Copernican astronomy was about to dislodge Earth from the center of the universe, a start to the Scientific Revolution.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Mar 25, 2013
...If our destiny is to be freed from toil by robot helpers, what are we supposed to do with our days?To begin to tackle that existential question, I decided to invite along a scholar of work to the Automate trade show. And that's how my guest, Burton J. Bledstein, an expert on the history of professionalism and the growth of the modern middle class, got into an argument with the head of a robotics company.It happened at the booth for Adept Technology Inc., which makes a robot designed to roam the halls of hospitals and other facilities making deliveries. The latest model—a foot-tall rolling platform that can be customized for a variety of tasks—wandered around the booth, resembling something out of a Star Wars film except that it occasionally blasted techno music from its speakers. Bledstein was immediately wary of the contraption. The professor, who holds an emeritus position at the University of Illinois at Chicago, explained that he has an artificial hip and didn't want the robot to accidentally knock him down. He needn't have worried, though; the robot is designed to sense nearby objects and keep a safe distance....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Mar 24, 2013
Tom Holland is the author of numerous historical works, including "The Shadow of the Sword," and is the presenter of the BBC's Making History. Although Hilary Mantel is apparently yet to begin the third volume of her trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell, we can be confident of several plot twists that it will not feature. Cromwell will not precipitate a civil war. He will not betray the husband of his foster-sister, with whom he is in love. He will not escape the executioner's block. His downfall is scripted. The history books cannot be cheated. Mantel's Cromwell is as bound to the inevitability of his doom as any prisoner to a rack.
Source: NYT
Mar 24, 2013
...If the nation has a father of bank insurance, it is Joshua Forman, one of the promoters of the Erie Canal. Early in the 19th century, New York State had a string of bank failures, and Martin Van Buren, then governor, asked him to restructure the banking industry. Forman’s insight was that banks were vulnerable to chain-reaction panics. As he put it — in a line unearthed by the Harvard Business School historian David Moss — “banks constitute a system, being peculiarly sensitive to one another’s operations, and not a mere aggregate of free agents.”In 1829, Forman proposed an insurance fund capitalized by mandatory contributions from the state’s banks. Debate in the State Assembly was heated. Critics said failures could overwhelm the fund; they also argued that its very existence would reduce the “public scrutiny and watchfulness” that restrained bankers from reckless lending. This remains the intellectual argument against insurance today. But Forman’s plan was enacted, and subsequently five other states adopted plans.All did not go smoothly. In the 1840s, during a national depression, 11 banks in New York State failed and the insurance fund — as prophesied — was threatened with insolvency. The state sold bonds to bail it out....
Source: ArmenPress
Mar 23, 2013
YEREVAN, MARCH 23, ARMENPRESS: Being a country which experienced the suffering of the genocide, Israel has to recognize Armenian Genocide. Israeli historian, scholar and expert specializing on Holocaust and Genocide studies, racism and contemporary Jewry Yair Auron made a statement at two-day international scientific conference titled “Armenian Genocide. Challenges ahead of the century”....
Source: AP
Mar 23, 2013
When the president of Ohio's state school board posted her opposition to gun control, she used a powerful symbol to make her point: a picture of Adolf Hitler.
