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: Democrat and Chronicle
Feb 20, 2012
Lynn D. Gordon showed a passion for promoting the role of women in history, both in scholarly writings and in inspirational teaching at the University of Rochester.Ms. Gordon, who died on Feb. 9 from cancer at the age of 65, played a key role in the early years of the Susan B. Anthony Center for Women’s Studies at UR. After her book, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era was published more than two decades ago, Ms. Gordon was named president of the History of Education Society. Acting on her interest in women trailblazers in history, Ms. Gordon started on a biography about Dorothy Thompson, who was a foreign correspondent and columnist from the 1920s to the 1950s. When Ms. Gordon died, she had nearly completed the biography. Her family and colleagues hope that they can finish and publish this work....
Source: NYT
Feb 20, 2012
Ronald Fraser, an English oral historian known for his deftness at collecting and presenting ordinary people’s experiences during momentous events like the Spanish Civil War, died on Feb. 10 in Valencia, Spain. He was 81.Tariq Ali, a friend and colleague, announced the death. He gave no cause.Mr. Fraser used transcriptions of interviews, the oral historian’s principal tool, to write books chronicling working-class life, the ways of a Spanish village, the 1968 student uprisings in the United States and Europe, and even his own life.His most influential book was “Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War,” a 628-page work published in 1979 that Paul Preston, a historian of the Spanish Civil War, said in The New York Times Book Review would “take its place among the dozen or so truly important books about the Spanish conflict.”...
Source: PennLive
Feb 19, 2012
Like most professions, presidents vary in quality. There are the good, the bad and the forgettable. But who is the best? The worst? And just how does Pennsylvania’s James Buchanan stack up?Professors at colleges around the midstate shared their opinions. While the majority of history professors named Lincoln as the best overall, when it came to judging for economic, homeland security or international issues, his name is absent from the “best” or “worst” slot.Here are the verdicts of the professors interviewed.The best Abraham Lincoln “Most scholars would say he faced the most awesome challenges and handled them in a way that was as good as it can possibly get. Lincoln’s ability to manage a war to a successful conclusion, a very complex and bloody war, and to redefine the meaning of America — that’s pretty good stuff.” — Michael J. Birkner, professor of history at Gettysburg College.“Lincoln was both the greatest communicator and also the best decision-maker. He was responsible for saving the union more than any other individual. He created a series of speeches and letters that explain American civic life more than anyone else has ever done.” — Matthew Pinsker, professor of history at Dickinson College.
Source: WaPo
Feb 19, 2012
The Republican presidential campaign is breathing new life into the Founding Fathers.In recent months, Republican candidates have invoked these original American statesmen to provide powerful political precedents on issues as diverse as the “Me Generation,” inequality, the legalization of marijuana, the policies of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, foreign military intervention, same-sex marriage and religion in public life. And although in real life they often bitterly disagreed with one another, the newly imagined Founding Fathers have reached a surprising degree of harmony in the minds of the GOP presidential candidates on these contemporary matters — many of which were unimaginable in an era of horse-drawn carriages, kerosene lamps and powdered wigs....Many historians say, however, that the GOP candidates’ portrait of the past misrepresents it.“You can’t ask what the framers would do without giving them the same information we have,” says Stanford University history professor Jack Rakove. “You can’t pluck them out of the past and put them down in the present. They were deeply empirical in their political thinking.”...
Source: WaPo
Feb 18, 2012
Robert K. Webb, 89, a longtime history professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County who was one of the country’s foremost scholars of British history, died Feb. 15 at his home in Washington. He had lymphoma, his daughter Margaret Webb Pressler said.Dr. Webb, who usually published under the name R.K. Webb, was perhaps best known as the author of “Modern England: From the 18th Century to the Present,” which was first published in 1968 and remained a standard college textbook for more than 30 years. He wrote several other books and was also the co-author, with Yale historian Peter Gay, of another college textbook, “Modern Europe,” first published in 1973....
Source: N-Y Historical Society
Feb 16, 2012
New York, NY, February 16, 2012 —Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, announced today that historian John Lewis Gaddis, recipient of the National Humanities Medal in 2005, will receive New-York Historical’s seventh annual American History Book Prize for George F. Kennan: An American Life(Penguin Press, 2011). He will be presented with a $50,000 cash award, an engraved medal and the title of American Historian Laureate on April 13, 2012, during the Weekend with History event of the New-York Historical's Chairman's Council.Roger Hertog, Chairman of the New-York Historical Society's Board of Trustees, stated: “A master historian vividly tells the story of the grand strategist who shaped foreign policy over the last sixty years.”
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Feb 15, 2012
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson has called it a "clash of titans," a battle over Princeton land linking two giants of American history: George Washington, father of the country, and Albert Einstein, father of modern physics.On one side are scholars and preservationists who see the 21-acre tract owned by the Institute for Advanced Study as hallowed ground where Washington led American troops to victory over the British in 1777.On the other side is the institute, where Einstein was a faculty member and where scientists see the land, next to Princeton Battlefield State Park, as the site of much-needed faculty housing.McPherson and fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer have proposed a compromise that would permanently preserve about 14 acres and allow 15 housing units, screened by trees, to be built on seven acres....
Source: Gettysburg News
Feb 13, 2012
The 2012 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, which includes an award of $50,000, will go to co-winners William C. Harris of North Carolina State University, for “Lincoln and the Border States: Preserving the Union,” (Kansas) and Elizabeth D. Leonard of Colby College, for “Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky” (UNC Press).The Prize is awarded by Gettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. The winners were chosen from 116 nominations. Each will receive $25,000 and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens's life-size bust, "Lincoln the Man" in a ceremony April 11 in New York City.The Prize was co-founded in 1990 by businessmen and philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, co-chairmen of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York and co-creators of the Gilder Lehrman Collection, one of the largest private archives of documents and artifacts in the nation. The Institute is devoted to history education, supporting history theme schools, teacher training, digital archives, curriculum development, exhibitions and publications, and the national History Teacher of the Year Award program....
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2012
One thing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney seem to have in common these days is an appreciation for the neoconservative historian Robert Kagan.The Romney campaign has retained Mr. Kagan as a foreign-policy adviser, and according to news reports, President Obama has read and been influenced by a recent Kagan essay in The New Republic, which addresses “the myth of American decline” and underscores the importance of the United States’ maintaining its “global responsibilities.”
Source: AHA Blog
Feb 13, 2012
Julia Brookins AHA Special Projects Coordinator Washington, D.C.—The American Historical Association (AHA) is initiating a nationwide, faculty-led project to articulate the core of historical study and to identify what a student should know and be able to do at the completion of a history degree program. Professors Anne Hyde (Colorado College) and Patricia Limerick (University of Colorado Boulder) will lead accomplished faculty from more than sixty colleges and universities across the country to frame common goals and reference points for post-secondary history education. The project will engage employers, alumni, students, and others in exploring and enhancing how the study of history provides the foundation for a life of active citizenship, continued learning, and successful employment.
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2012
Week seven of Melissa Harris-Perry’s introductory course in African-American studies at Tulane University includes a lecture about “the hollow prize” — a theory that African-Americans tend to be elected as mayor only after a city has tipped into economic decline.One day last summer, when Ms. Harris-Perry was filling in for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, she recast the class lecture as a television segment, invoking Detroit; her adopted home, New Orleans; President Obama; and tax policy.“I’ve given that lecture a million times — a million times,” Ms. Harris-Perry said in a recent interview. “But I do it once on Rachel’s show, and it was everywhere the next day. It was up on Web sites, people were e-mailing me — that, for me, was a really clear indication of how powerful television is.”Now, MSNBC is about to introduce a progressive talk show called “Melissa Harris-Perry” on Saturday and Sunday mornings. Ms. Harris-Perry will be the only tenured professor in the United States — and one of a very small number of African-American women — who serves as a cable news host....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 12, 2012
A real historian, who knows a few facts about what really happened during the Haymarket riots, has crossed swords with Wikipedia editors who are insisting on pushing a fantasy history on the great unwashed.Writing in the Chronicle, Timothy Messer-Kruse is a professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University and has been studying the Haymarket riot and trial of 1886. He has also written two books on the subject.When a bomb was thrown during an anarchist rally in Chicago, America had its first Red Scare. There was a high-profile show trial and a worldwide clemency movement for the seven men executed.Messer-Kruse decided to experiment with editing one particularly misleading assertion on Wikipedia that the prosecution, led by Julius Grinnell, did not offer evidence connecting any of the defendants with the bombing.His quest to find out what really happened began after he read an identically worded statement in a history text book and one of his students pointed out that if the trial went on for six weeks and no evidence was presented, the question was what they talked about.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 12, 2012
Three weeks before the history department at Rutgers University began making decisions about whom to admit to its doctoral program this year, about one-quarter of its faculty gathered over lunch to talk about the employment crisis, the future direction of their field, and all the things they don't know about their recent Ph.D.'s.Some participants voiced frustration because the department does not have comprehensive data on how many graduate students entered the program, how long they stayed, and where they eventually found jobs.The department keeps a good list of contacts of graduates for an annual newsletter, and a department administrator has undertaken the arduous task of locating former students, but some faculty members say the results are still well short of a complete record of what Ph.D.'s have or have not done. Rudolph M. Bell, a Rutgers professor who specializes in Italian history, says that tracking Ph.D.'s is a matter of quality control. Being able to provide accurate data, he says, is important for making the case to potential donors and foundations that a department is worthy of their support.But fear and faculty resistance, he says, have hampered the collection of data in some programs, including at Rutgers.
Source: Press Release
Feb 11, 2012
Edwin Black has announced that after 1.2 million copies of IBM and the Holocaust have sold worldwide, the book is completely out of print. However, on the anniversary of the book's original publication in 2001, a new “Expanded Edition” will be released which will include some 32 pages of never-before-published internal IBM correspondence, State and Justice Department memos and concentration camp documents that will graphically chronicle exactly what IBM did and what they knew during the twelve-year Hitler regime. IBM has never denied any of the information in the book and for years has claimed that it has no information about its Hitler-era activities involving the Third Reich.
Source: Mother Jones
Feb 11, 2012
When Marine investigators learned last November that a scout sniper platoon in Afghanistan was using a Nazi "SS" flag as its standard, it wasn't a member of the unit who told them. It was Iraq war veteran Waitman Beorn, a visiting history professor at Loyola University New Orleans, also a Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowship recipient who teaches at the National Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Dr. Beorn's research on Nazis and genocide is informed by his military background: He is a West Point graduate and former officer who served as a scout platoon leader in Iraq from 2003-2004. Through his work he seeks to teach "ethical decision-making in a military context using the Holocaust as a vehicle."
Source: Radio Australia
Feb 10, 2012
In the early 18th Century, Makassar, a city in the south of Indonesia's Sulawesi Island, was renowned as a major regional trading hub.Seafarers from as far as China and the Gulf came to the port-city to trade for spices and precious metals.The Macassans also had close links with northern Australia where they were attracted by its vast supply of lucrative sea cucumbers or trepangs.But little else is known about the links between Macassan fishermen and indigenous Australians from the north.In fact, those links are still evident today in the form of art, language and even architecture and were the subject of a major symposium at the Australian National University in Canberra....
Source: David A. Walsh for HNN
Feb 10, 2012
A history professor at Texas A&M University—Central Texas has filed a petition to release sealed testimony from the very first Watergate trial, which he hopes will shed light on the motivation for the infamous break-in.Luke Nichter, who runs the website nixontapes.org (which deals primarily with the non-Watergate aspects of the Nixon presidency), made the initial move to unseal the material in 2009, when he wrote to Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the District Court for the District of Columbia expressing his desire to unseal testimony from the first Watergate court case, United States v. Liddy. On Tuesday, Lamberth, who in July 2011 ordered Richard Nixon’s Watergate grand jury testimony released, gave the government thirty days to object to Nichter’s request.Nichter believes that the sealed testimony from U.S. v. Liddy may shed new light on the Watergate case. “Watergate has been the subject of innumerable books, articles, and movies,” he said in an interview, “but there are still unanswered questions.” The sealed materials, he wrote in a letter to Lamberth, “may be the key to determining why the Watergate break-in occurred, who ordered it, and what the burglars were looking for….”
Source: ABC News (Australia)
Feb 10, 2012
An Australian historian has uncovered hidden documents which reveal that African American troops used machine guns to attack their white officers in a siege on a US base in north Queensland in 1942.Information about the Townsville mutiny has never been released to the public.But the story began to come to light when James Cook University's Ray Holyoak first began researching why US congressman Lyndon B Johnson visited Townsville for three days back in 1942.What he discovered was evidence detailing one of the biggest uprisings within the US military."For 70 years there's been a rumour in Townsville that there was a mutiny among African-American servicemen. In the last year and a half I've found the primary documentation evidence that that did occur in 1942," Mr Holyoak told AM....
Source: PanArmenian
Feb 9, 2012
PanARMENIAN.Net - Taraf newspaper published an article by Associate Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, Taner Akcam, who argues that Armenian-Turkish journalist Hrant Dink’s murder was orchestrated as revenge for the assassination of Talat Pasha, the mastermind of the Armenian Genocide, The Armenian Weekly reported.“Hrant Dink was murdered in order to avenge Talat Pasha’s murder,” Akcam believes.“Everything, and I mean everything, was organized in a way to seek revenge for the assassination that occurred in 1921. Upon his release after serving time in prison for his role in the McDonalds bombing of 2004 in Trabzon, Yasin Hayal, the person who planned Hrant’s murder, spoke about Talat Pasha with his father. He asked his father, “Dad, do you know how Talat Pasha was killed?” Yasin Hayal himself knew a thing or two about it, and added, “Did you know that the man who killed Talat Pasha was never punished, and that he was released?”...
Source: NPR
Feb 9, 2012
Historian Noah Andre Trudeau is known for uncovering secrets of the Civil War. His previous books, Bloody Roads South and Gettysburg, have unveiled information about Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's march to the sea in 1864, and the legacy of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. Now, in preparation for a book about a largely unexamined period of President Abraham Lincoln's life, Trudeau is in search of witnesses.At the end of the Civil War, between March and April 1865, Lincoln went to Northern Virginia to meet with his generals. He shook hands with thousands of Union soldiers and visited the former confederate capital in Richmond, Va. But little is known about the last week of his life before his assassination on April 14, 1865. Trudeau is seeking diary entries, letters or stories of people who encountered Lincoln at the time. If you have information that could be helpful, Trudeau wants you to contact him.Trudeau talks with NPR's Neal Conan about his quest and the information he's collected so far....
