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: Newswise
Sep 21, 2011
LEXINGTON, Ky. (Sept. 21, 2011) —Because the Russian Empire had 18 million men-in-arms, 5 million prisoners-of war and 2 million deaths during World War I, University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences history Professor and department Chair Karen Petrone just couldn't believe that no one remembered World War I in Russia."I spoke to colleagues in Russian history who told me that World War I memory was not a category in the Soviet Union, and that there was nothing about it in governmental archives," Petrone said. "Scholars believed that World War I memory did not exist."While Petrone didn't necessarily set out to prove her fellow researchers wrong in 2002, she was inspired by the work of World War I scholars like Paul Fussell and decided to look into the question."France had 5,000 monuments dedicated to World War I," Petrone said. "While the Soviet government privileged commemorations of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War over World War I, it just didn't make sense that there was no memory at all. I set out to look for remembrance of World War I in Russia."...
Source: Randall Stephens at the Historical Society
Sep 20, 2011
Randall Stephens is Associate Professor of History at Eastern Nazarene College.For the last year I've been kicking around an idea for a new series of video interviews. I thought it might be interesting to ask various historians why they decided to study history. In the short responses that I'll post you'll hear about what drew a scholar to the field and what engaged them on a personal level. I've always enjoyed reading autobiographical reflections of historians, and this is, in some way, a little extension of that genre.The first installment features Jack N. Rakove, who reflects on his early fascination with history and his later pursuit of graduate study and career as a professor and author.
Source: Kansas City Star
Sep 20, 2011
When Daniel Yergin published "The Prize," an 873-page exhaustive historical narrative about oil, in 1991, it changed how policymakers and academics alike thought about energy. His new book "The Quest," published Tuesday, is likely to do the same."The Quest," equally meaty at 804 pages, is broader in theme. It's subtitled "Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World." As with his earlier work, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, Yergin relies on stories and vignettes to bring to life the changes and challenges that are taking place in the energy sector and the global scramble for oil.Yergin, who's now an energy consultant, begins where he left off, highlighting the events now reshaping global politics and oil politics. The introduction covers this year's devastating tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan and the Arab Spring, involving the collapse of strongmen across the Middle East and North Africa....
Source: AP
Sep 20, 2011
ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — Three University of Michigan researchers are among the latest 22 recipients announced Tuesday of the no-strings-attached MacArthur Foundation "genius grants."The list of winners of the $500,000 fellowships for 2011 by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation includes the Ann Arbor school's Tiya Miles, Melanie Sanford and Yukiko Yamashita.
Source: Rutgers University News
Sep 20, 2011
CAMDEN – Jacob Soll, a professor of history at Rutgers University–Camden and a global expert on Machiavelli, is one of 22 Americans selected as 2011 MacArthur Fellows, according to an announcement issued by the MacArthur Foundation today.Soll’s MacArthur Fellowship is the only one awarded to a Delaware Valley recipient in 2011. It is the first received on the Rutgers–Camden campus.Sometimes known as the “genius grant,” the extraordinarily competitive MacArthur Fellowship celebrates individuals who show exemplary creativity in their work and the potential for still more in the future. The five-year, $500,000 grant also awarded on the basis of a clear record of significant achievement.Recipients are nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and never notified of their candidacy. Awardees must be citizens or residents of the United States and must not hold elective office or advance positions in government....
Source: Independent (UK)
Sep 19, 2011
Joyce Youings, Emeritus Professor of English Social History at the University of Exeter, was the eldest daughter of Harold and Ruby Youings. She was born in Barnstaple, Devon, on 11 September 1922 and attended Barnstaple Girls' Grammar School, where she excelled in the classroom and on the sports field, playing hockey for Devon County.
Source: UW Madison News
Sep 19, 2011
William Courtenay, University of Wisconsin–Madison Hilldale Professor and Charles Homer Haskins Professor Emeritus of History, has been elected a corresponding fellow to the British Academy.The British Academy is the United Kingdom's national academy for humanities and the social sciences, and corresponding fellows are scholars outside the U.K. who have gained international standing in their areas of research. As many as 15 scholars are elected corresponding fellows each year....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 18, 2011
Never usually one to do anything without great fanfare, Niall Ferguson, the bombastic television historian, has quietly married Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP, who lives under a fatwa after writing the screenplay for Submission, a film critical of Islam.Henry Kissinger, the former American secretary of state, who was the subject of a biography by Ferguson, 47, was among the guests at the wedding in Boston, Massachusetts. He provided Ferguson with access to his White House diaries and letters for what the historian calls a “warts-and-all biography”....
Source: Sunday's Zaman
Sep 18, 2011
Professor Yavuz Selim Karakışla is a history expert, someone who has researched subjects such as what the women you would come across some 100 years ago on the Galata Bridge would be wearing or what they would be talking about.
Actually, Karakışla's true area of expertise is the history of the military officers in Sultan Suleyman's (Kanuni) army as well as the cooks who prepared the food for these men. As it is, Karakışla believes that the course “history of the Ottoman Empire” ought to have its name changed to the “history of Ottoman society.”
Source: Lawrence Journal
Sep 16, 2011
A Douglas County judge Friday sentenced a University of Chicago professor to serve two days in jail plus a month on house arrest for drunken driving in April in Lawrence with his 4-year-old daughter in the car.“I accept full responsibility for the occurrence, and I am extremely sorry and regretful for all sorts of reasons,” said Cornell H. Fleischer,60, who also called it the “biggest mistake that I’ve ever made in my life.”
Source: H-Net Environment
Sep 16, 2011
We are pleased to announce that Christopher F. Jones is the winner of the 2011 Joel A. Tarr Envirotech Prize for his article, “A Landscape of Energy
Source: Reuters
Sep 15, 2011
LONDON (Reuters) - Writing authoritatively about a spy service is hard for an outsider but Britain's is a particularly tough case.Fact must be sifted from a big body of popular fiction, much by novelists with an intelligence background including James Bond author Ian Fleming and the current Hollywood version of John le Carre's "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" starring Gary Oldman as spymaster George Smiley.Gordon Corera, author of a history of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from the Cold war to the present day, set out to solve this conundrum by persuading several former UK intelligence officers to tell him some of their best stories.These personal recollections are blended with anecdotes culled from more narrowly focused histories and memoirs written by men and women of various nationalities who dealt with SIS, also known as MI6, while toiling in diplomacy or the armed services over the decades....
Source: LA Times
Sep 15, 2011
A UC Irvine professor overstepped his boundaries when he told students that no disruptions were allowed during the Israeli ambassador's visit on campus last year, according to testimony given Wednesday in the so-called Irvine 11 trial in Santa Ana. UC Irvine professor Rei Terada, an expert on the history and guidelines of free speech, told the Superior Court jury that fellow professor Mark Petracca, the event's emcee, had no authority to set stringent ground rules. Before bringing Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren to the stage on Feb. 8, 2010, Petracca told the audience that he expected the highest civility....
Source: Chicago Tribune
Sep 14, 2011
Forget everything you have learned on "CSI" and "Law & Order." "A trial of 1886 was completely different," said Timothy Messer-Kruse, who will discuss the historic Haymarket trial during the Haymarket Commemoration Weekend at the Chicago History Museum on Sept. 24 and 25.On May 4, 1886, in what came to be known as the Haymarket incident, eight policemen and at least four civilians were killed when a bomb was thrown during a workers meeting in Haymarket Square, near Desplaines and Randolph streets, during a rally. The bomber's identity and motivation have been debated ever since....
Source: Britannica Blog
Sep 14, 2011
In the early years of the Great Depression, a teenaged boy, an artist in training, wandered away from civilization and headed into desert country that had daunted countless explorers before him. For a few years he wandered the Colorado Plateau, and for a few years reports of Everett Ruess made their way back to the civilized places, along with occasional postcards and drawings from Ruess himself.And then—well, and then Everett Ruess disappeared, as completely as anyone has ever left this earth.In 2009, as Encyclopaedia Britannica contributing editor Gregory McNamee reported then, it seemed the mystery of Ruess’s vanishing might have been solved. Apparently not, at least not to everyone’s satisfaction. So Philip Fradkin, a longtime chronicler of the modern American West, details in his new book Everett Ruess: His Short Life, Mysterious Death, and Astonishing Afterlife. McNamee caught up with Fradkin at his home near San Francisco for this conversation.
Source: Entertainment Weekly
Sep 14, 2011
In early 1964, Jacqueline Kennedy opened up to historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. about life with John F. Kennedy, only months after his assassination.... Historian Michael Beschloss pored over and annotated the 8.5 hours of interview, in addition to writing the book’s introduction. We asked Beschloss a few questions about the newly released recordings, which had been sealed for 47 years.ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What surprised you most while studying the recordings for the first time? I was surprised that she seemed to have so much influence on JFK’s attitudes toward the people who worked for him. For instance, she she says she disliked Secretary of State Dean Rusk and wished JFK would fire him. He told her he intended to do so in 1964. Others she admired, like Robert McNamara, the Defense Secretary, did extremely well in the Kennedy government. She may not have been the only reason, but what she privately told JFK didn’t hurt. There are many other instances of this in the book....
Source: BBC
Sep 13, 2011
William Wallace was no more than a "co-leader" in events which sparked a Scottish uprising against Edward I in 1297, a historian has claimed.Professor Dauvit Broun argues that the killing of the Sheriff of Lanark was as much down to a knight called Richard of Lundie, as it was by Wallace.He said Wallace's status was cemented by others' death, capture or surrender.The University of Glasgow academic's claims appear in an article published on the website Breaking of Britain.Prof Broun said: "Richard of Lundie was a close ally of William Wallace and rose with him in opposition to the English occupation of Scotland."It was Lundie who led the band with Wallace that was responsible for the killing of the Sheriff of Lanark on 3 May 1297....
Source: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Sep 13, 2011
New research on President Frankin D. Roosevelt's controversial views regarding Jews and other minorities will be presented by scholars at a conference in New York City on September 18, 2011. The conference, "While Six Million Lived: America and the Jewish Refugee Crisis, 1933-1939," is the ninth national conference of The David S.
Source: AP
Sep 13, 2011
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — Joe Sando, a member of the Jemez Pueblo who became the first Pueblo member to chronicle Pueblo life as a historian and writer, has died.His publisher and friend, Marcia Keegan of Clear Light Publishers, said the 88-year-old died Tuesday of natural causes at an assist living center in Albuquerque....
Source: NYT
Sep 12, 2011
Allan J. Lichtman, the presidential historian at American University whose “Keys to the White House” system we posted a critique of here last week, has kindly prepared a response. (Mr. Lichtman’s system forecasts that President Obama is a heavy favorite to be re-elected in 2012.)Mr. Lichtman’s response is reproduced below. My policy is to let authors have their own say in these cases, so any further response I have will be contained in a separate post, with the exception of a brief technical comment at the end.The Keys Work: A Response to Nate Silver Allan J. LichtmanI read with great interest Nate Silver’s analysis in the New York Times blog of my system for predicting presidential election results, The Keys to the White House. His work demonstrates the kind of lively debate that the keys can generate. However, his critique of the keys system cannot withstand scrutiny.
