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: Press Release
Dec 19, 2012
British Historian Sir Max Hastings has been named the recipient of the 2012 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The $100,000 honorarium, citation and medallion, sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation, will be presented at the Library’s annual Liberty Gala on October 27, 2012. The video announcement was made today at pritzkermilitarylibrary.org. “Max Hastings is a gifted narrative historian who has made a significant contribution to the way we understand military conflict from a global perspective,”said Colonel (IL) J.N. Pritzker, IL ARNG (Retired), Founder of the Pritzker Military Library and Tawani Foundation. “He has a keen ability for connecting the plans of world leaders with the battlefield actions of individual soldiers. Perhaps most importantly, his accessible style of writing brings the story of the Citizen Soldier to a broad audience and makes him popular amongst scholars and the casual reader.”
Source: Express India
Dec 16, 2012
New Delhi Historian and educationist Mohammad Amin, who was a teacher at St. Stephen’s College for over four decades, passed away in New Delhi on Saturday. He was 86. Affectionately called Amin Saheb, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2010. He is survived by his wife Khursheed Amin, son Shahid Amin and daughter Ghazala Amin. His last rites would be performed tomorrow. Valson Thampu, principal of St Stephen’s College, said: “Mr Amin had a very memorable and long association with the college. Apart from being an enthusiastic teacher, he influenced generations of students. I was fortunate to have been his colleague from 1973 till the time he retired.”...
Source: AFP
Dec 15, 2012
VIENNA — Austrian conductor Herbert von Karajan, a major figure in 20th-century classical music, was a bigger fan of the Nazis than he made out, according to a historian who has unearthed previously unseen documents."It is time to probe scientifically the claims that Karajan constructed and cobbled together... and which in the end he really believed himself," said Oliver Rathkolb from Vienna University.Presenting his findings at a seminar on Friday, Rathkolb cited anti-Semitic comments from letters written by Karajan (1908-1989) in his youth and said that at school the legendary maestro had belonged to an ultra-nationalist, pan-German youth group in Salzburg....
Source: Asia Society
Dec 13, 2012
One of the most important awards a book about the past can win is the Cundill Prize in History given by McGill University, and news recently broke that this year's winner is UMass-Amherst China specialist Stephen R. Platt, for his Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War, which was published in hard cover early this year and is about to come out in a paperback edition. It's a book I know well, having reviewed it for the Wall Street Journal, where I described it as an "impressive, gracefully written" account of a major event in Chinese history and noted the care that Platt takes to place this mid-19th-century conflict into a robustly international perspective.
Source: WaPo
Dec 13, 2012
Paul K. Van der Slice, 77, who taught history at Montgomery College for 37 years before retiring in 2005, died of cancer Dec. 9 at his home in Bethesda.His daughter, Jennifer Van der Slice, confirmed his death.Mr. Van der Slice specialized in the intellectual, social and cultural history of the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a subspecialty in utopian communities of the 19th century. For five years, he was chairman of the history department.As a Smithsonian fellow in 1998-99, he organized a collection of primary source readings on labor in 19th-century American utopian communities....
Source: Penn Current
Dec 13, 2012
A new $50 million museum chronicling the richness and complexity of Jewish life and culture in Russia—the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center—opened in Moscow last month, and Penn’s Benjamin Nathans, the Ronald S. Lauder Endowed Term Associate Professor of History in the School of Arts & Sciences, played a key role in creating the state-of-the-art institution.An expert on Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union, and modern European Jewish history, Nathans chaired the international academic advisory committee that designed the content for the 40,000-square-foot museum, and brought scholars from Russia, Israel, and the United States on board to compose the various exhibitions....
Source: WaPo
Dec 13, 2012
The iconic red sandstone used to build the Smithsonian Castle, one of Washington’s most recognizable buildings, was quarried by slaves, including some who were once most likely owned by Martha Washington, according to new historical research to be published Thursday.The discovery by anthropology professor Mark Auslander adds to what has been a years-long reckoning with slavery’s role in Washington landmarks, including the Capitol and the White House, and adds nuance to the historical portrait of the Smithsonian Castle, which was built between 1847 and 1855.Auslander, a native Washingtonian, said in an interview that the Smithsonian has been reluctant over the years to address whether slave labor might have played a part in the history of the Castle. “It’s just an area of total silence,” said Auslander, whose findings are to be unveiled in Southern Spaces, an online, peer-reviewed journal published in cooperation with Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. “The Smithsonian hasn’t gone through the truth-and-reconciliation process that a lot of institutions have gone through. But I think there’s a willingness to do so.”...
Source: Huntsville Item
Dec 12, 2012
HUNTSVILLE — Historians aspire to ignite interest today in events of from the past, professors aspire to entice students with structured education, and authors aspire to evoke emotion through the power of words. Jeffrey Littlejohn, associate professor of history at Sam Houston State University, is a combination of all three. He is the co-author of Elusive Equality: Desegregation and Resegregation in Norfolk’s Public Schools, published this year by the University of Virginia Press. Littlejohn wrote the 320-page tome along with co-author Charles Ford, department chair and professor of history at Norfolk University. “We were determined to write something that people want to read but that also has a deeper message,” Littlejohn said. “I hope there are vignettes in our book that people will identify with and will think ‘this is a great story.’ ”...
Source: NYT
Dec 12, 2012
To perhaps no one’s surprise, “The Passage of Power,” the latest installment of Robert Caro’s acclaimed biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, has topped the History News Network’s online poll to choose the best history book of 2012.But perhaps more interesting is what a good year William Seward, the former secretary of state who died in 1870, is having.
Source: Big Pond News
Dec 11, 2012
Two students have been arrested in Colorado after allegedly giving cannabis-laced brownies to unsuspecting classmates and a professor.The pair are accused of serving up the cakes as part of a 'bring food day' at the University of Colorado.Police were called after an unnamed history professor needed hospital treatment, complaining of feeling dizzy and losing consciousness....
Source: NOLA.com
Dec 11, 2012
History lovers of New Orleans, it's time to give yourself a fun -- and free -- dose of local info. A collaboration of the History Department of the University of New Orleans and the Communication Department of Tulane University has produced New Orleans Historical, a free app for the Android or iPhone or tablet, as well as a rich website with historical photos, audio, video and more. Links to the smart phone applications are on the home page of the website.... "We finally have a way to exhibit a lot of the history we've been researching for the last few years," said Michael Mizell-Nelson, associate professor of history at UNO. "It's a platform for making undergrad and graduate research work available to the public."...
Source: Deccan Herald
Dec 9, 2012
Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s anti-apartheid icon, was a member of the Communist party and held a senior rank in the organisation, a British historian has claimed in a new book.In his new book “External Mission: The ANC in Exile, 1960-1990”, Professor Stephen Ellis, has unearthed fresh evidence that during his early years as an activist, Mandela did hold senior rank in the South African Communist Party, or SACP.The former South African president now 94-years-old, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, has always denied being a member of the South African branch of the movement, which mounted an armed campaign of guerrilla resistance along with the African National Congress (ANC). According to Ellis, Mandela joined the SACP to enlist the help of the Communist superpowers for the ANC’s campaign of armed resistance to white rule. As evidence of Mandela’s Communist party membership, Ellis cites minutes from a secret 1982 SACP meeting, discovered in a collection of private papers at the University of Cape Town, in which a veteran former party member, the late John Pule Motshabi, talks about how Mandela was a party member some two decades before....
Source: Corpus Christi Caller Times
Dec 9, 2012
WASHINGTON — Retired Del Mar College professor Herb Arbuckle's thoughts turned to a little known provision relating to the Lone Star State after he read about an online petition with nearly 119,000 signers calling for Texas to secede "peacefully" from the Union.To be clear, Arbuckle, who taught math and history, pointed out Texas can't legally secede, and he wasn't singing the praises of those who signed the petition on WhiteHouse.gov in what political observers believe is a sign of protest at President Obama's re-election."We did fight a bloody Civil War, which proved no one has the right to secede," Arbuckle, 68, said in a telephone message. "If these idiots with their petition don't understand that, then they are indeed fools."...
Source: PJ Media
Dec 9, 2012
Source: New Haven Register
Dec 8, 2012
NEW HAVEN — The Emancipation Proclamation, the seminal American document that freed the slaves, had a sweeping side effect many people don’t realize.It changed the face of war. Thanks to Abraham Lincoln’s great Proclamation, America developed a blueprint for the conduct of war that would reverberate from 19th-century Appomattox to 21st-century Afghanistan.“It’s a part of emancipation,” says Yale University law and history professor John Fabian Witt, author of the new book, “Lincoln’s Code: The Laws of War in American History,” Free Press, $32....
Source: The Hindu
Dec 8, 2012
Mark Mazower is Ira D. Wallach Professor of History at Columbia University in New York. Widely recognised as one of the finest historians of his generation, Professor Mazower studied at Oxford and Johns Hopkins, completing his D. Phil in Oxford in 1988. He has taught at Princeton, Sussex, and London University. His chief works include No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (2009); Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe (2008); Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430-1950 (2004); Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998); and Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-44 (1993), several of which have won major prizes. His most recent book is Governing the World: The History of an Idea (2012). He is a specialist of Greece, the Balkans, and more generally of the history of Europe in the twentieth century. Prof. Mazower will deliver the Sixth [Indian Economic and Social History Review] IESHR Annual Lecture in New Delhi on December 11, 2012. Here, he responds to questions from Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor of History at UCLA.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Dec 8, 2012
Neil Leonard, 84, a pioneering jazz historian and critic and a retired professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, died Sunday, Oct. 13, at Hahnemann University Hospital after a stroke. A memorial service is scheduled for Sunday, Feb. 23, at Penn.Mr. Leonard's doctoral thesis, Jazz and the White Americans: The Acceptance of a New Art Form, became a groundbreaking book on cultural awareness of jazz. It was published in 1962 by the University of Chicago Press.He was on the faculty at Penn from 1961 until 1990s. He worked in the American civilization department and later in the history department....
Source: WaPo Book Review
Dec 8, 2012
John Tirman is executive director of the MIT Center for International Studies and the author of “The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America’s Wars.”When I first met Howard Zinn 40 years ago, I had known him as a leading antiwar critic, civil rights activist and radical historian. I expected a brooding and perhaps angry intellectual deeply at odds with a nation that shortly afterward reelected Richard Nixon by a landslide. But my first impression of him, sitting in his office at Boston University, was of a casual, jovial and self-deprecating professor who, I learned, was provoked to a kind of controlled fury only by war and injustice. It was an impression shared by his legions of friends.Zinn was a force in the civil rights movement and one of the originators of oral history and history “from below.” His work in the South in the 1950s and early ’60s, while he taught at Spelman College in Atlanta, was galvanizing for a new generation of black students, Alice Walker, Julian Bond and Marian Wright Edelman among them. He helped guide the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a major component of the black uprising, and wrote a number of seminal articles and books about the movement, including “The Southern Mystique” and “SNCC: The New Abolitionists.”...
Source: PBS (Click for video)
Dec 7, 2012
How does modern technology allow us to engage in conversations about the past? Gwen Ifill talks to presidential historian Michael Beschloss about how the Twitter-verse has opened up new ways to view history in the digital age.* * * * *
Source: PBS Newshour
Dec 7, 2012
Watch Sharing American History Lessons in 140 Characters or Less on PBS.
