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: This is London (UK)
Apr 24, 2012
A leading BBC historian who has become a poster girl for women who opt out of motherhood said she had been “educated out” of having children.Dr Lucy Worsley, chief curator of the Historic Royal Palaces, said she would not have enough time to do all the things she enjoys if she had children....
Source: Southwest Iowa News
Apr 24, 2012
OMAHA - Rajmohan Gandhi visited Omaha to give a lecture and receive the Creighton presidential medallion.Even with Mohandas K. Gandhi as a grandfatherly example, historian and human rights advocate Rajmohan Gandhi can be tempted to despair by the state of the world decades after the Mahatma led India to freedom through nonviolent resistance.But Gandhi finds reasons for hope and faith in events large and small, he said in an interview Monday before delivering a lecture at Creighton University."The temptations of despair are very frequent," said Gandhi, a former member of India's Parliament who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "But I do see the daily evidence of the triumph of goodness....
Source: Religion Dispatches
Apr 24, 2012
It’s usually clear to Bart Ehrman who loves him and who hates him. Evangelical Christians have been raking Ehrman over the coals for years for his rejection of biblical inerrancy—and atheists and humanists have embraced his writing as ammunition in the fight against the evils of organized religion.With his new book, Did Jesus Exist?, Ehrman is making friends of his enemies and enemies of his friends as he debunks the work of so-called “mythicists”—writers who have argued that a man named Jesus who taught about the coming Kingdom of God never really existed, and that the religions created around him are nothing but fantasy.Ehrman, who teaches religion at UNC Chapel Hill, brings his expertise as a historian to the question and concludes that all the evidence available—both from pagan and Christian sources—reveal that Jesus did exist. But while the historical Jesus may not have been invented, it doesn’t mean that invention is not part of the story....RD: What inspired you to write this book? You write that you had another book in mind instead of this one.
Source: BuffaloNews.com
Apr 24, 2012
Garry Wills, one of the leading thinkers on Catholicism in America and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, has a few choice words for the Vatican on the matter of its recent rebuke of American nuns.In a blog today for the New York Review of Books, Wills writes, under the heading "Bullying the Nuns":"The Vatican has issued a harsh statement claiming that American nuns do not follow their bishops' thinking. That statement is profoundly true. Thank God, they don't."I wrote about this controversy the other day and got a great deal of response from local readers, expressing a broad spectrum of opinion. Some of the response came by email, with many readers providing memories of nuns who made a positive difference in their lives, and a few saying "You go" to the Vatican....
Source: Houston Chronicle
Apr 22, 2012
BUFFALO GAP, Texas (AP) — A frontier hunter once watched for three days as an immense buffalo herd streamed through this gap in the Callahan Divide.McMurry University professor Don Frazier can drive home that history lesson to students in a classroom at the Buffalo Gap Historic Village.But putting them behind the sights of a Sharps .45-70 rifle and pulling the trigger on a metal buffalo target at Fort Chadbourne takes history a few shots beyond imagination....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 22, 2012
Nothing disturbs print-centric researchers like the idea of kicking books out of a library to make room for computers. The New York Public Library set off a fierce debate recently with its plans for a major reorganization. The proposed overhaul, known as the Central Library Plan, includes selling two midtown branches and moving many of the three million books now housed under the main reading room at 42nd Street to a remote-storage facility in New Jersey. The library shares the facility in a consortium arrangement, called Recap, with Columbia and Princeton Universities.Anthony T. Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University, summed up researchers' anxiety in a commentary published in the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, this month. "My stomach hurts when I think about NYPL, the first great library I ever worked in, turned into a vast Internet cafe where people can read the same Google Books, body parts and all, that they could access at home or Starbucks," he wrote.The library promises that materials sent to Recap will be safely stored and quickly accessible—usually within 24 hours—to patrons who request them. Critics say that remote storage doesn't work so well in practice, and that the wrong message is sent by taking books out of the heart of the library....
Source: NCPH Press Release
Apr 22, 2012
Graduate Student Travel AwardsKate Freedman – University of Massachusetts, Amherst Jordan Grant – American University Jee-Yeon (Jay) Kim – University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Evan Medley – Arizona State University Maggie Schreiner – New York UniversityGraduate Student Project Award Erica Hague and Jennifer Clark Scott, University of North Carolina-Wilmington. “Flashback: Community Life through the Lens of Mack Munn, 1940-1960”The winning project is a photograph collection documenting rural African American life during a time of rapid decline in rural black populations. The strengths of “Flashback” lay first in its community connection—including twenty oral histories, close collaborative work with a local historical society, and in its documented opening- night success; secondly in its wide-reach—from the eighth-grade curriculum component, to the travelling exhibit, and the Facebook site; and finally in its innovative design—including the building of the porch, the use of QR codes to link exhibit material to audio, and the innovative use of window screens/shades to present exhibit text.Honorable Mention: Michelle Antenesse and Bethany Girod's exhibit "New Birth of Freedom: Civil War to Civil Rights in California," California State University, Fullerton.
Source: 60 Minutes
Apr 22, 2012
HNN: Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren, the historian, was on the hot seat on Sixty Minutes tonight, for objecting to a story correspondent Bob Simon was doing before the story even aired. The story focused on the suffering of Christians in the traditional holy places of Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth, whose numbers have been dwindling as a result of Israeli measures to limit terrorism. The story did not suggest that Israel is targeting Christians. Rather, they have been collateral damage as Israel cracks down on Muslims. An excerpt follows.
Source: HNN Staff
Apr 21, 2012
Below is a list of award winners at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians/National Council on Public History. Full OAH coverage can be found here.Roy Rosenzweig Distinguished Service Award: Ira BerlinFrederick Jackson Turner Award: David Sehat, Georgia State University. The Myth of American Religious FreedomMerle Curti Award: Susan J. Pearson, Northwestern University. The Rights of the Defenseless: Protecting Animals and Children in Gilded Age AmericaJames A. Rawley Prize: Cindy Hamovitch, College of William & Mary. No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable LaborRichard W. Leopold Prize: William A. Dobak, U.S. Army Center of Military History (retired). Freedom by the Sword: The U.S. Colored Troops, 1862-1877Avery O. Craven Award: Nicole Etcheson, Ball State University. A Generation at War: The Civil War Era in a Northern Community
Source: UW-Madison
Apr 20, 2012
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies, has selected three University of Wisconsin-Madison scholars for induction into the 2012 class.As in the past, the academy has chosen leaders from the realms of arts, academics, business, philanthropy and public service for its latest group....Steve J. Stern, the Alberto Flores Galindo and Hilldale Professor of history, is a prize-winning historian of Latin America. His recent research focuses on human rights and cultural memory after the "dirty wars" of the 20th century, notably Chile after the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and Peru after the Shining Path war. His books and articles have spanned five centuries and many countries, and have demonstrated the inventiveness of Latin American responses to unequal structures of power, with sometimes surprising impacts on world history....
Source: Eurasia Review
Apr 20, 2012
...Just recently Walter Laqueur published his new book ”After the Fall. The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent”. This new book is much more than an update of his former book on Europe. It offers new analyses and new perspectives.Dieter Farwick: I remember quite well the debate about your prognosis at the end of 2006. Your conclusion was based among other things upon the demographic developments in Europe with its aging and greying population and an “Islamisation” in major European cities.Now, some five years later, are you still convinced that you were right or do you have to correct your predictions?Walter Laqueur: I was right—but not because I am such a good prophet.. I was writing after all not about the future but described things that had already taken place. But many did not want to see them. Why? Because it is part of the human condition not to accept unpleasant facts. Because it is part of the human condition to engage in wishful thinking. It is better to be mistaken because of excessive optimism rather than be right because of pessimism. Think of Cassandra in Greek mythology. She was always right in her predictions (Apollo had given her this gift). But this did not at all add to her popularity. She was a tragic figure....
Source: USA Today
Apr 18, 2012
JERUSALEM – Zvi Shefel recalled the day the German army arrived at his Polish town of Slonim in the summer of 1942. The soldiers immediately began mass exterminations and eventually killed more than 25,000 Jews, including his mother, father and sister.There is nothing in that town that Shefel, 86, can find about his family, he said while attending the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial Thursday for the "Day of Remembrance" commemoration of the 6 million Jews killed in the Nazi genocide of World War II."I've visited all the archives in Belarus to find the names of people, but they weren't there because the archives of Slonim were burned by the Germans when they retreated — but we have to keep the memory of what happened in order to never forget," he said....
Source: Pulitzer website
Apr 16, 2012
[Pulitzer in History]
Source: WaPo (AP)
Apr 16, 2012
[Pulitzer in History][Manning] Marable, a longtime professor at Columbia, died last year at age 60 just as “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention” was being released. Years in the making, the book was widely praised, although some of Malcolm X’s children objected to the troubled portrait Marable offered of the activist’s marriage to Betty Shabazz.“It is so rewarding to see Manning’s work honored as a landmark achievement in the documentation of 20th century American history,” Wendy Wolf, associate publisher at Viking, said in a statement.[Pulitzer in Biography]Another long-term project, John Lewis Gaddis’ ”George F. Kennan: An American Life,” won the Pulitzer for biography. Gaddis is a Yale University professor and leading Cold War scholar who began work on the Kennan book in the early 1980s. The project was delayed by Kennan’s longevity. Kennan, a founding Cold War strategist and a Pulitzer winner, was in his 70s at the time he authorized the book. He asked only that Gaddis wait until after his death.Kennan lived to be 101.“He was a prize-winning author himself, so he would have been pleased,” said Gaddis, whose biography also won the National Book Critics Circle award.
Source: NYT
Apr 16, 2012
Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have spent the last decade tracking the incomes of the poor, the middle class and the rich in countries across the world. More than anything else, their work shows that the top earners in the United States have taken a bigger and bigger share of overall income over the last three decades, with inequality nearly as acute as it was before the Great Depression....
“In a way, the United States is becoming like Old Europe, which is very strange in historical perspective,” Mr. Piketty said. “The United States used to be very egalitarian, not just in spirit but in actuality. Inequality of wealth and income used to be much larger in France. And very high taxes on the very rich — that was invented in the United States,” he said.
Mr. Saez added, “Absent drastic policy changes, I doubt that income inequality will decline on its own.”
The two economists’ project of mapping income inequality started two decades ago, when Mr. Saez was teaching at Harvard and Mr. Piketty teaching down the road at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Their innovation was to measure American income inequality historically. Existing data went back only to the 1970s. Tedious archival research at the Internal Revenue Service allowed them to stretch the data all the way back to 1913.
Once they had collected the data, the computation was easy.
Source: NYT
Apr 14, 2012
PROF. PIERS J. HALE knew something was up when his students at the University of Oklahoma were clamoring this spring to get into his medical ethics class, which was formerly populated largely by social science majors. What led to the sudden burst of popularity, he discovered, were plans by the Association of American Medical Colleges to revise the medical school admissions test to incorporate a hefty dose of social science....“Enrollment doubled and I had to turn 20 away,” said Professor Hale, a professor of the history of modern science. “But what’s really exciting is not that taking this class will get these kids into medical school, but that it will help them become better physicians.”......[T]he Association of American Medical Colleges began three years ago to redesign the MCAT, surveying thousands of medical school faculty members and students to come up with a test tailored to the needs and desires of the 21st century. In addition to more emphasis on humanistic skills, the new test had to take into account important new values in medicine like diversity, with greater focus on health care for the underserved, Dr. McGaghie said.
Source: NYT
Apr 12, 2012
Robert Caro probably knows more about power, political power especially, than anyone who has never had some. He has never run for any sort of office himself and would probably have lost if he had. He’s a shy, soft-spoken man with old–fashioned manners and an old-fashioned New York accent (he says “toime” instead of “time” and “foine” instead of fine), so self-conscious that talking about himself makes him squint a little. The idea of power, or of powerful people, seems to repel him as much as it fascinates. And yet Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying power and what can be done with it, first in the case of Robert Moses, the great developer and urban planner, and then in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose biography he has been writing for close to 40 years. Caro can tell you exactly how Moses heedlessly rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through a middle-class neighborhood, displacing thousands of families, and exactly how Johnson stole the Texas Senate election of 1948, winning by 87 spurious votes.
Source: This is Bristol (UK)
Apr 11, 2012
WHEN it comes to carving out a career in the competitive world of archaeology these days, it's all about finding your own niche – but few young archaeologists are carving out a future in their field quite as literally as Bristol University student Chantel Summerfield.The 23-year-old PhD student has become the world's only expert on arborglyphs – that is, tree graffiti; the inscriptions carved into tree trunks by soldiers with bayonets.From bored squaddies on Salisbury Plain to terrified GIs trekking through Normandy in the wake of the D-Day invasions – each carving Chantel uncovers tells its own story of a soldier's life."I've followed many of the First World War soldiers' carvings from trees that once stood a few miles behind the front line on the Western Front, through to finding their graves in Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries," Chantel says....
Source: HNN Staff
Apr 11, 2012
CBS news is reporting that George Zimmerman, the 28-year-old Florida man who fatally shot 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida in February, has launched a website to publicly defend himself. His lawyers have confirmed that the website belongs to him.The site, http://therealgeorgezimmerman.com/, prominently features a quotation from historian, sociologist, professor, and HNN blogger James Loewen: "People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. Evidence must be located, not created, and opinions not backed by evidence cannot be given much weight." Mr. Loewen has expressed his desire to respond to Mr. Zimmerman's use of his words -- HNN will bring you more on this story as it develops.The spartan website also features quotes from Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and Henrik Ibsen, as well as an appeal for donations and a contact form. Zimmerman does not go into detail about the shooting, only referring to it as a "life altering event which led me to become the subject of intense media coverage."
Source: NPR
Apr 10, 2012
Police are still investigating whether the weekend shooting spree in Tulsa, Okla., was racially motivated. A massive riot there in 1921 left about three dozen people dead. University of Michigan history professor Scott Ellsworth, a native of Tulsa, talks to Steve Inskeep about the riot. [CLICK ON THE LINK FOR FULL AUDIO]
