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: Peter Reddaway and Stephen F. Cohen in The Nation
May 23, 2012
Peter Reddaway is a professor emeritus of political science at George Washington University, a former director of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and author of books on human rights abuses in the Soviet era. Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University. His The Victims Return: Survivors of the Gulag After Stalin, also published in Moscow, will appear in paperback in June.Many Western observers believe that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian regime has in effect banned a Russian edition of a widely acclaimed 2007 book by the British historian Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia. A professor at University of London’s Birkbeck College, Figes himself inspired this explanation. In an interview and in an article in 2009, he suggested that his first Russian publisher dropped the project due to “political pressure” because his large-scale study of Stalin-era terror “is inconvenient to the current regime.” Three years later, his explanation continues to circulate.
Source: Huffington Post
May 22, 2012
Over five centuries after the famed explorer's death, historians are taking a fresh look at what motivated Christopher Columbus to make his voyage across the Atlantic -- and how his faith may have played into those motivations.Some scholars, after analyzing Columbus' will and other documents, have devised a new theory about the explorer. They believe he was a Marrano, or a Jew who pretended to be a Catholic to avoid religious persecution. These historians also theorize that Columbus' main goal in life was to liberate Jerusalem from Muslim control, and that he decided to take his historic quest to North America in order to find a new homeland for Jews who had been forced out of Spain.
Source: RIA Novosti
May 21, 2012
...Vladimir Medinsky, 41, a senior official in the ruling United Russia, will replace Alexander Avdeyev, who had held the job of Culture Minister since 2008, President Vladimir Putin said....He is primarily known to the public for his Myths About Russia series of books, published since 2008 and comprising titles such as “About Russian Alcoholism, Sloth and Cruelty” and “About Russian Slavery, Dirt and ‘Prison of the Nations.’”...Numerous publications, including in the online magazines Actual History and Polit.ru, accused Medinsky of massive plagiarism in his dissertation thesis, which deals with foreigners’ accounts on Russia during the 15th-17th centuries....
Source: Transportation Nation
May 21, 2012
(New York, NY — Anna Sale, It’s a Free Country.Org) “Don’t you think this is a wonderful thing to walk across this bridge!”Historian David McCullough has had a lot of honors in his career – two Pulitzers, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and just this week a gold medal for biography from the American Academy of Arts and Letters – but he still gets that thrill crossing the Brooklyn Bridge.On a bustling, bright morning this week, the 78 year-old and I started walking over from Manhattan. He is re-releasing a 40th anniversary edition of his 600-page history, The Great Bridge: the Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge.Every few minutes, he pauses to command “Look at this!” with a sweeping gesture of his hand....
Source: Palo Alto Online
May 21, 2012
In this age of glowing screens, George Knoles' boxes of correspondence feel like treasure chests. Letters are penned on blue Aerogrammes or typed on gossamer onionskin paper. The handwriting can be impossibly small. Dip into a box, and you might find a letter from Knoles during World War II, stamped with "Passed By Naval Censor." Or a 1950s plea from one of Knoles' Stanford students for a better grade. For years, there's an annual missive from Stanford's history department, offering Knoles a job for the coming year: as assistant, and then instructor, and then acting assistant professor, and on up the ladder. One of the first reads: "It was voted to recommend you to the President for a position as assistant in history for the year 1935-36 at a salary of $400 for three quarters." Since Knoles has been a historian for decades, it makes sense that he ensured his papers were cared for. The letters are part of the 15 linear feet of George Harmon Knoles Papers in Stanford University Libraries' Department of Special Collections and University Archives....
Source: Montgomery Advisor
May 21, 2012
Ed Bridges, director of the Alabama Department of Archives and History for the past 30 years, has announced plans to retire as the state’s top historian.Bridges, 66, informed the department’s board of trustees of his retirement decision last week and made it official Monday, citing several reasons, including stamina.“Physically, I can no longer maintain the pace of work that the job requires,” he said, in a letter to George Evans, chairman of the department’s board of trustees. “It seems a little ironic that what on the surface may appear to be a quiet, easy job is, in fact, a very demanding one.”The trustees are expected to have a successor in place by Oct. 1, as Bridges completes his fifth six-year term....
Source: Boston Herald
May 21, 2012
Thomas O’Connor, a Boston College historian and professor emeritus known for his work on the history of Boston, has died.School officials said Monday afternoon that O’Connor suffered a fatal heart attack in his Milton home on Sunday. He was 89.A South Boston native, O’Connor explored his hometown in books including "Boston Catholics," ”Civil War Boston" and "The Boston Irish."...
Source: Jerusalem Post
May 20, 2012
BERLIN – Arno Lustiger, an autodidactic historian and author who brilliantly and meticulously chronicled Jewish resistance to the Hitler movement, died on Tuesday in Frankfurt.Lustiger, who survived six Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and two death marches, was 88 years old. He was born in 1924 to Polish-speaking Jews in Bedzin (Bendzin in Yiddish), in that part of Upper Silesia which became part of Poland after World War I.He worked tirelessly to debunk the prevailing German historical view that Europe’s Jews allowed themselves to be carted off to Nazi extermination camps “like sheep to the slaughter.”Lustiger’s seminal work, Fighting to the Death: The Book of Jewish Resistance 1933-1945, was published in 1994....
Source: The Voice of Russia
May 17, 2012
What would you define as the key lessons the world needs to remember not to run into another tragedy, like the World War II obviously was?Well, the key lesson of World War II is that appeasement of aggression does not pay. Actually the policy which tried to compromise the European principles with Nazism failed. And the major leaders of the great European powers which were trying to prevent Germany from rising again actually contributed much to this rising, starting with the Treaty of Versailles which humiliated Germany and the Soviet Union made them outcasts in the European system.
Source: US News & World Report
May 16, 2012
At 65, W. Andrew "Andy" Achenbaum, a professor of history and social work at the University of Houston, doesn't plan on retiring anytime soon. "At this point, I'm sort of an elder of the tribe … I don't want to waste my time doing things that aren't meaningful to me and hopefully constructive to others," he says. To him, mentoring students, teaching, and writing are among the most meaningful activities he can pursue.A new survey from Charles Schwab suggests that Achenbaum is not an anomaly. In fact, 32 percent of 60-something middle-income workers surveyed said they don't want to retire. Three in four respondents between the ages of 50 and 69 said they are "sticking with their jobs because they want to," and not because they have to for financial reasons. And one in four workers say this is "the happiest time in their working career."...
Source: NPR
May 16, 2012
Wisconsin Democrats hope to unseat Republican Governor Scott Walker in a recall election. In the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Zimmerman, a lifelong Democrat, says he is "appalled." The recall, he writes, "epitomizes the petty, loser-take-all vindictiveness of contemporary American politics." [Click on link to hear the interview]
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 16, 2012
The warning last year from Russell Berman, who at the time was president of the Modern Language Association, was apocalyptic: If doctoral programs in the humanities do not reduce the time taken to graduate, they will become unaffordable and face extinction.Now, Berman has taken his ideas home. At Stanford University, where he is a professor of comparative literature and directs the German studies program, he and five other professors at the university have produced a paper that calls for a major rethinking at Stanford -- a reduction in the time taken to graduate by Ph.D. candidates in the humanities, and preparing them for careers within and beyond the academy. The professors at Stanford aren't just talking about shaving a year or so off doctoral education, but cutting it down to four or five years -- roughly half the current time for many humanities students....
Source: Felicia B. LeClere in Inside Higher Ed
May 16, 2012
Felicia B. LeClere is a principal research scientist in the Public Health Department of NORC at the University of Chicago, where she works as research coordinator on multiple projects. She has 20 years of experience in survey design and practice, with particular interest in data dissemination and the support of scientific research through the development of scientific infrastructure.
Source: NPR
May 15, 2012
Over his long academic career, Bernard Lewis has arguably become the world's greatest historian of the Middle East. Now, at 96, Lewis turns his attention inward in a memoir that looks back on his life, work and legacy.The linguist and scholar's career began before World War II, and in a new memoir he covers more than a few sensitive areas, from race and slavery in Islam, to the clash of civilizations and his long argument with scholar Edward Said, to his role as an adviser to former Vice President Dick Cheney.NPR's Neal Conan talks with Lewis about his new book, Notes on a Century. [CLICK ON LINK FOR FULL INTERVIEW]Interview HighlightsOn religious tolerance under Islamic rule"It is required by Islam. Part of the basic rules of Islam as laid down in the Quran require a measure of tolerance. But one has to be careful in how one understands that term.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
May 14, 2012
Harriet Fleisher Berger, 94, of East Falls, a Drexel University professor from 1967 to 1988 whose life was shaped by progressive causes, died of Parkinson’s disease on Friday, May 4, at her home.Mrs. Berger was the former wife of David Berger, city solicitor from 1956 to 1963 in the Democratic administration of Mayor Richardson Dilworth, which ended in 1962. Mr. Berger’s later career focused on class-action lawsuits involving the likes of the Three Mile Island and Exxon Valdez disasters.A son, Jonathan, wrote in an appreciation of Mrs. Berger that “she worked tirelessly throughout her life in support of politically and socially progressive policies for workers’ rights, occupational health and safety, environmental protection, public education, civil rights, rights for women and universal access to health care.”...
Source: Princeton University
May 14, 2012
Princeton University scholar Benjamin Elman has studied the history of East Asia for most of his intellectual life. Instead of getting easier, it has become more complicated — which for him is a good thing. Elman's ongoing interest is to re-examine our understanding of China and Japan by rethinking how the history of East Asia has been told, especially in the West, but also in China, Japan and Korea. To do so, he and other scholars are paying particular attention to the early modern period in East Asia and India — around 1600 to 1800 — to understand key developments. For Elman, this endeavor is crucial because it focuses on a time when this part of the world had advanced in many spheres, before the so-called ascendancy of Europe as an economic and political power over the course of the 19th century....
Source: NYT
May 13, 2012
After Ferdinand De Wilton Ward Jr. became notorious as a Gilded Age financial schemer of rare weaselly ingenuity, his picture appeared in a manual of phrenology. The shape of his “low-top head, very broad from side to side,” was said to explain why Ward had shown the “Secretiveness, Cunning, Acquisitiveness, Destructiveness” to bilk investors, shame and bankrupt a former president and try to kidnap his own son.Within the large Ward clan Ferdinand remains “the family sociopath,” although each of his parents was a candidate for that distinction. It took a great-grandson of Ferdinand’s, the prizewinning historian Geoffrey C. Ward, to write the scandal-filled but eminently fair book that airs this dirty laundry.
Source: BBC News
May 11, 2012
The BBC has named the renowned economic historian Niall Ferguson as the 2012 Reith Lecturer.The lecture series titled 'The Rule of Law and its Enemies' will explore the influence of man-made institutions on global economic growth and democracy.Radio 4 controller Gywneth Williams says she is "delighted" to appoint Prof Ferguson - "an eminent historian with a global perspective."Prof Ferguson says it is "an immense honour" to be chosen as Reith Lecturer....
Source: Lee White for the National Coalition for History
May 11, 2012
Archivist of the United State David S. Ferriero recently announced the appointment of William A. Mayer as Executive for Research Services for the National Archives and Records Administration, effective June 18, 2012.Mayer brings to this assignment more than 20 years of experience working in dynamic research environments, most recently having served as the University Librarian at American University in Washington, DC. Prior to his work at American University, Mayer served from 2001 to 2007 as the Associate University Librarian for Information Technology and Technical Services at George Washington University. He was directly responsible for the development, implementation, and integration of information technology services across the entire library system operation. He also served as an adjunct faculty member for the School of Library and Information Science at Catholic University.
Source: Business Insider
May 10, 2012
Tony Yang is getting beaten to a pulp.He's not wanted by mobsters nor is he another Cybercrime bully. The former University of California doctoral student (c/o '09) just says that's what it feels like each quarter when he wraps up an adjunct teaching gig and goes home without a permanent job offer. "It can be very tough on the pysche," he told the Chronicle of Higher Education. "The darkest moment had to be when I finished my dissertation. I turned it in and there (was) no job ... So when I graduated, the first thing I had to do was file for unemployment."As a kid, his family supplemented their income with food stamps. Decades later, he found himself in the same position, applying for welfare to get by when his doctoral degree wasn't enough to bring home a steady paycheck....
