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: WSJ
Aug 28, 2012
Mike Bullington, senior archives manager for McDonald's Corp., MCD +0.71% is a connoisseur of fast-food artifacts.At work, he's surrounded by bags and packaging from years past. His cubicle holds a purse woven from Big Mac wrappers, a gift from a former chairman's wife, and a Ronald McDonald fashioned from Legos, turned in by a McDonald's franchisee. But the prize he treasures most recalls a menu item that had a brief stint in restaurants: Onion Nuggets, a precursor of sorts to Chicken McNuggets."Not many people have seen them, even within the company," says Mr. Bullington. The packaging, he says, is a "hidden gem."
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Aug 28, 2012
Historian and novelist Philippa Gregory has given her readers another royal gem of a book. Gregory is known primarily for her historical novels, including her most famous, The Other Boleyn Girl, which was made into a movie starring Natalie Portman. In The Kingmaker’s Daughter, she looks again at life in the court.Royal sisters Anne and Isabel Neville are among the richest heiresses of England in the 1400s. They are the daughters of the Earl of Warwick, the man who put many kings on their thrones: Richard, Duke of York; his sons Edward and George; and finally Henry VI. Gregory combines the fast-paced historical events of the years around the War of the Roses with the main battles and players of the time. All this circles around and through the fictional lives of Anne and Isabel – from their early days in court, to their role in the overthrow of kings, to Anne’s eventual coronation as wife of Richard III....
Source: CBS News
Aug 27, 2012
[CLICK ON LINK ABOVE TO VIEW VIDEO]Jeff Glor talks to historian Fredrik Logevall about his new book, "Embers of War," which traces how the twentieth century conflict in Vietnam drew in all the world's powers, led to the demise of France's colonial empire, and embroiled the United States in an unavoidable quagmire. Logevall is John S. Knight Professor of International Studies and professor of history at Cornell University, where he serves as director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies.
Source: Minnesota Public Radio
Aug 27, 2012
We're hearing about plenty of protests this year. Between Pussy Riot, the Occupy movement and demonstrations in Europe over the economy, it seems the world is always protesting. But are these protests really effecting change, or are they merely an outlet for anger?Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown, will join The Daily Circuit Monday to talk about what constitutes an effective protest in a world where most organizing and activism now occurs online....
Source: PR Web
Aug 27, 2012
North Carolina, host to the 2012 Democratic National Convention, was key to Barack Obama winning the presidency in 2008, making him the first Democratic president since Jimmy Carter to win the “Old North State.”But Obama’s victory in North Carolina was narrow—he won by about 14,000 votes—and the African-American vote was a central component of Obama’s success.Now fast forward to 2012. In May, the state overwhelmingly passed a ban on same-sex marriage with 61 percent of voters in favor of the ban; 39 percent against it. That 61 percent, too, included a large number of African-American votes. The day after the ban passed, President Obama publicly announced his support of same-sex marriage, raising the question of whether Obama can count on winning the state again in 2012. Numerous early polls in North Carolina show Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney in the lead.Is North Carolina still a swing state?Most definitely, says Allan Lichtman, distinguished professor of history at American University in Washington, D.C., and an expert on presidential elections....
Source: Rafu Shimp
Aug 27, 2012
Alexander Saxton, UCLA history professor emeritus, and former acting director and long-time Faculty Advisory Committee chair of the Asian American Studies Center, Alexander Saxton, passed away on Aug. 20, 2012 in Lone Pine, Calif. at the age of 94.Professor Saxton, throughout his time at UCLA, was a staunch supporter and actively involved in the Asian American Studies Center, providing key leadership and mentoring many students over the years. Of his time at the center, Professor Saxton said:“It turned out to be one of the most demanding (and rewarding) experiences of my life…. Being a proponent of ethnic studies at UCLA in the 1970s and ’80s was good combat training. There still was big opposition to ethnic studies on grounds that ranged from blatant racism to lack of high academic principle. We constantly had to fight for approval for research funding and core courses, and we remained endlessly involved in struggles over initial appointments and tenure promotion for scholars committed to ethnic studies.”...
Source: Timothy McCarthy for the Daily Beast
Aug 27, 2012
Timothy Patrick McCarthy teaches history, literature, and public policy at Harvard University, where he also directs the Sexuality, Gender, and Human Rights Program at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. An award-winning scholar, teacher, and activist, he is editor of The Indispensable Zinn: The Essential Writings of the "People’s Historian" published by the New Press. He is also author of Protest Nation: Words That Inspired a Century of American Radicalism.Howard Zinn would have been 90 years old on Aug. 24. Widely and affectionately known as “the people’s historian” during his lifetime, he was a prolific scholar and prodigious activist. To many of us, myself included, he was also a mentor and friend. He taught us all. Few historians write and make history, and for more than half a century, Howard Zinn did both....
Source: NYT
Aug 27, 2012
In 1988 Pankaj Mishra was a recent university graduate in the northern Indian city of Benares with big literary ambitions he had little idea how to fulfill. But when he heard that a local library was going to be auctioning back issues of The New York Review of Books as waste paper, he knew exactly what to do....Now Mr. Mishra seems poised for a fresh round of intellectual battle. His latest book, “From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia,” has already been greeted by some in Britain as a fuller, footnoted riposte to Mr. Ferguson’s sunny view of Western imperialism, with the historian Mark Mazower, writing in The Financial Times, praising its “power to instruct and even to shock.”Some on the right have dismissed the book as a polemic, but Mr. Mishra brushes aside the term. “If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there’s going to be some kind of friction,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in London. And when it comes to the mainstream media, he added, “there are still very few people presenting perspectives other than that of the West.”
Source: BuzzFeed
Aug 27, 2012
TAMPA, Fla — Newt Gingrich kicked off "Newt University" — a characteristic hybrid of a campaign event, business venture, and effort by the Republican Party to keep Gingrich busy — in a modest-sized, half-full hotel ballroom today, a room dominated by a large stand of cameras.The event is the beginning of a sort of intellectual track of Republican politics, financed by the Republican Party and slated to last through the election. It's carried by KAPx, the distance-learning platform of the Washington Post-owned for-profit education company Kaplan, Inc., though a Gingrich spokesman said Kaplan was just a vendor, not a partner, in the effort.The aim, Gingrich spokesman RC Hammond told BuzzFeed, is to allow Republicans to understand "why we say these things" and to "win arguments in their communities." It's modeled, for Gingrich, in part on his GOPAC tapes, training cassettes for electoral politics that were the viral media of their day, the 1980s and 1990s....
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Weird Facts about Presidential Conventions
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 26, 2012
Professor Gerard Turner, who has died aged 86, was an authority on the history of the microscope and other scientific instruments.Peering through a magnifying glass or camera viewfinder, he conducted painstaking studies of old instruments , often managing to establish the authorship of a particular unsigned historical piece — a vacuum pump, perhaps, or an astrolabe. He took a particular delight in the study of scientific toys.His approach to his subject was marked by what one contemporary described as “a mixture of exacting archaeological scrutiny combined with a Sherlock Holmesian analysis”. Partly because he pooh-poohed uncritical “connoisseurs” and the uncorroborated opinion of so-called “experts”, Turner’s influence on other scholars in the field was unequalled....
Source: Longview News-Journal (TX)
Aug 26, 2012
Longtime history professor and renowned non-fiction writer Bill O’Neal has been named Texas State Historian, a job that will carry him across the state as ambassador of what he described the “richest and most colorful history” among all the 50 U.S. states.O’Neal, 70, of Carthage, was appointed to the position by Texas Governor Rick Perry, who administered an oath of office at the state capitol in Austin on Wednesday.“I am thrilled to be named to this position,” O’Neal said. ”It’s not a paying job, it is an honorary position, but as it turns out, a very busy one.”...
Source: WFAA-TV (Dallas)
Aug 25, 2012
DALLAS — Dallas historian Farris Rookstool was just eight years old when Neil Armstrong went to the moon."I can still see it like a movie in my brain," he said.But he didn't know how much time he would eventually spend with this American hero.With mementos he holds with pride, Rookstool shared some of his fondest memories with News 8."He didn't have a colossal ego. He was just an ordinary guy who did extraordinary things," Rookstool said. "To me, that's what makes him a totally remarkable person."...
Source: Las Vegas Journal-Record
Aug 25, 2012
Las Vegas' Nevada State Museum, which celebrates its first birthday Oct. 28, has a new director: Southern Nevada historian and author Dennis McBride.McBride, curator of history and collections since 2007, succeeds David Millman, who retired early this year.The new $51 million museum, located on the grounds of the Springs Preserve, is "the only museum in this part of the state that includes the entire history of the state of Nevada, from prehistory - which means fossils - to present-day history," with a focus on everything from government agencies to showgirls, McBride said. "It's the cultural repository for the state of Nevada."...
Source: NOLA.com
Aug 25, 2012
Elizabeth Pearce has written about drinks. She’s lectured about drinks. She’s even sung about drinks. But cocktails are not really her main concern.“I’m less interested in drinks,” Pearce said, “and I’m more interested in drinking in America.”Her new walking tour through the French Quarter, launched last May, uses cocktails as a lens to capture the history and the quirks of this imbibing destination. The journey starts at Vacherie restaurant, where everyone grabs a cooler bag filled with four drinks: a Sazerac, a St. Charles Hotel punch, a Hurricane and praline liqueur....
Source: NYT
Aug 25, 2012
...“There is a soaring rate of poverty in these new suburban regions,” said Lisa McGirr, a history professor at Harvard who studies the region. “I think it’s bound to have a political impact and to transform the ability of the Republican Party to appeal to suburbanites with private, individualistic solutions.”More transformative is the demographic shift brought on by the influx of Latino voters. It is upending the political makeup of states like Nevada, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Florida. And it has come when the Republican Party has been identified with tough measures aimed at curbing immigration.Many Republicans date the beginning of the decline to 1994, when Republicans in California backed a voter initiative, Proposition 187, to deny government services to immigrants in this country illegally. The law was eventually nullified by a federal court.“Once California started alienating Latinos and once Latinos started moving in large numbers to Arizona and in Texas, that changes the whole game,” said Richard White, a professor of history at the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford.
Source: NYT
Aug 25, 2012
NOTHING is visible at the intersection of Third Avenue and Eighth Street in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn to indicate that anything extraordinary is there. The artisanal-pie place on one corner and the auto body shops across the way suggest it is merely another spot in the city where grit is giving way to gentrification. But if a small group of history enthusiasts are right, this particular corner of Kings County is hallowed ground.They believe that there is a mass grave a few dozen yards to the east of the intersection that contains the remains of American heroes: soldiers from the First Maryland Regiment under Col. William Smallwood, which saved Washington’s army during the Battle of Brooklyn on Aug. 27, 1776. Their burial site, these advocates say, deserves the same level of veneration accorded the military cemeteries at Gettysburg and Normandy.The leader of the find-the-Marylanders group is Bob Furman, a Brooklyn historian and president of the Brooklyn Preservation Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to maintaining brownstone Brooklyn’s look and feel. “The evidence is quite strong,” Mr. Furman said. “I’m confident enough that I tell everyone I know....
Source: LA Review of Books
Aug 25, 2012
Fascinating things happen, the Pussy Riot trial reminds us, when music is used to give the finger to a stagnant government — especially an authoritarian one. In light of this, and the recent uptick in works (such as Slate editor William J. Dobson’s "The Dictator’s Learning Curve") arguing convincingly that the 2012 incarnations of still-Communist China and post-Communist Russia have more in common than anyone imagined, I was interested in learning more about possible parallels between the Pussy Riot phenomenon and Chinese punks, rebels, and rockers. So I shot off an email full of questions to Jonathan Campbell. Why turn to him? Because he spent 10 years living among, writing about, promoting, and playing the music of rockers in Beijing and is the author of Red Rock: The Long, Strange March of Chinese Rock & Roll (see Ali Pechman’s review here).¤
Source: Harvard Law School
Aug 22, 2012
Harvard Law School Professor Annette Gordon Reed ’84 has been appointed to the Charles Warren Professorship of American Legal History.Gordon-Reed, a recipient of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize in History, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Dorothy And Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, and a National Humanities Medal, is also a Professor of History in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed was elected a member of the American Academy of Art and Sciences in 2011.She currently shares the Warren chair with Professor Morton J. Horwitz, who plans to retire this year. For the academic year 2014-2015, Gordon-Reed will be the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen’s College, University of Oxford....
Source: Email to HNN
Aug 22, 2012
HNN received an email from Laurie Brand, Chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom for the Middle East Studies Association, responding directly to an article published on August 13 by Alan Luxenberg, director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, that criticized a perceived anti-Israeli bias within the organization, specifically at its 2011 conference. Read the original article here.Dear Mr. Luxenberg,I am writing in response to the e-mail message dated August 19, 2012 that you sent to members of the Middle East Studies Association’s Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) and that included the text of an article you published on the History News Network on August 13, 2012. In that article you expressed concerns about: (1) a problem that arose with regard to participation on a panel at the Middle East Studies Association’s annual meeting in December 2011; (2) what you claim is CAF’s disproportionate focus on violations of academic freedom by Israel; and (3) MESA’s position with regard to the public campaign advocating the academic boycott of Israel.
Source: Hillel Fradkin for the Jewish Ideas Daily
Aug 21, 2012
Hillel Fradkin is director of the Center on Islam, Democracy, and the Future of the Muslim World at the Hudson Institute.Bernard Lewis has published many books and still more articles on the history of the Middle East and Islam. On these subjects he is, simply, the pre-eminent authority. At 96, he has now published yet another book, a memoir titled Notes on a Century: Reflections of a Middle East Historian. It provides a fascinating account of the varied, extraordinary, unexpected life he has led; it also points beyond the personal to questions of history and the vocation of the historian.
