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: The Australian
Aug 31, 2011
EMINENT historian Stuart Macintyre has slammed an independent review of the University of Melbourne's school of historical and philosophical studies as lacking evidence and overseen by international academics with little experience of the Australian sector. Professor Macintyre, a former dean of arts at Melbourne and a professor at the school, said he feared the review was a "fix" to justify further staff cuts.The review blamed falling student enrolments at the school partly on the alleged reluctance of some staff to commit to the university's Melbourne model.It also said there were too many Australian historians compared with student demand and recommended that the Australian Centre scrap undergraduate teaching and cut academic staff from 12 to two....
Source: NYT
Aug 30, 2011
Stetson Kennedy, a folklorist and social crusader who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and wrote a lurid exposé of its activities, “I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan,” died on Saturday in St. Augustine, Fla. He was 94....Mr. Kennedy developed his sense of racial injustice early. A native of Jacksonville, Fla., he saw the hardships of black Floridians when he knocked on doors collecting payments for his father’s furniture store. His social concerns developed further when he began collecting folklore data for the Federal Writers’ Project in Key West, Tampa and camps for turpentine workers in north Florida, where conditions were close to slavery.After being rejected by the Army because of a bad back, he threw himself into unmasking the Ku Klux Klan as well as the Columbians, a Georgia neo-Nazi group. He was inspired in part by a tale told by an interview subject whose friend had been the victim of a racial murder in Key West....
Source: Outlook India
Aug 30, 2011
Legendary filmmaker Khwaja Ahmad Abbas was a believer of Gandhian principles but would not have approved of Anna Hazare and the manner in which the whole issue of corruption was "hijacked" for ulterior motives, says historian Suresh Kohli."He (Abbas) believed in Gandhi, and admired Nehru. He would surely not have approved of Anna Hazare, and the manner in which the whole issue of corruption has been hijacked for ulterior motives. Gandhi never approved of that."He never allowed his supporters to hijack his vision, and silently watched the blackmailed methodology that has seeped into contemporary body politic," Kohli, who has edited Abbas' book of stories An Evening in Lucknow, told PTI.According to Kohli,Abbas had a unique storytelling style."Like in other areas of creative expression, Abbas had an unusual approach to telling a story. Most of his stories are a mix of fact, and fiction, observed or experienced reality compounded with fantasy to make the work readable. He felt he must communicate his feelings, observations, philosophy with as wide a spectrum as possible."...
Source: KY3
Aug 30, 2011
ROLLA, Mo. – History will look at the 10 years since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as a period of “breathtaking American ignorance” on the part of the nation’s leaders, offset by tremendous adaptability among U.S. military personnel, says Dr. John C. McManus, a military historian at Missouri University of Science and Technology.“From the broader view, the same Wahabbi-oriented terrorists who attacked on 9/11 were actually at war with the United States long before that terrible day,” says McManus, an associate professor of history and political science at Missouri S&T.
Source: AHA Today
Aug 30, 2011
The Oral History Association (OHA), the principal organization of practicing oral historians in the United States, is seeking a new home for its executive office and staff beginning in 2013. It also plans to hire an Executive Director to serve as its principal administrator after its new institutional home is determined.Institutions interested in hosting the OHA’s offices are invited to send an initial expression of interest to OHA by November 1, 2011. (See details below). Viable candidates will be invited to submit a full proposal, due no later than March 1, 2012. A final decision is expected by May 2012.The OHA will initiate a search for the Executive Director during the spring/summer of 2012. Appropriate personnel from the host institution will be invited to participate in this search, and applicants affiliated with that institution will be welcome to apply. Our aim is to select the Executive Director by October 2012.
Source: Radio New Zealand
Aug 29, 2011
A New Zealand war historian will head back to Gallipoli in September as part of an archaeological survey of the Anzac battlefield.Ian McGibbon will be working there for the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, along with Turkish and Australian historians and archaeologists....
Source: The Oregonian
Aug 27, 2011
Where are the historians of Oregon? Why do we hear so little about them?We get plenty of stories about the state's novelists, memoirists and journalists but a minimum about the historians. Why is that? Are historians simply as uncharismatic as last year's bird nest? Have we just overlooked or forgotten them?In this regard, Oregon mirrors larger American cultural landscapes. U.S. historians rarely attract the national or global attention poured on novelists and biographers.Check names of international award winners. The list of American historians as Nobel Prize winners is nonexistent, zilch, nada. Except for scholars whose first interests are science or economics, no one with a history background has won a Nobel Prize. As in Oregon, the most prestigious awards very infrequently go to historians.Enough questions and finger-pointing. We need more answers and information about Oregon's chroniclers and their writings worthy of renewed attention.In the 19th century, Oregon historians or would-be historians devoted their pages primarily to describing new peoples, landscapes and experiences they encountered coming into the Oregon Country. Bona fide historians were in short supply.
Source: Salon
Aug 26, 2011
What has the left really accomplished over the past two centuries? FDR's New Deal remains one of the great American success stories. In the '60s, leftist politics created a massive countercultural movement -- and sexual and feminist revolutions. The civil rights movement transformed both American society and the American soul. But, if you compare the accomplishments of the American left to those of other parts of the world, like Western Europe, its record is remarkably dismal, with a surprising lack of real political and social impact.At least, that's the main takeaway from "American Dreamers," a new book by Michael Kazin, professor of history at Georgetown University, which covers nearly 200 years of struggle for civil rights, sexual equality and radical rebellion. His book explores the way the national conversation has been changed by union organizers, gay rights activists and feminists. He also writes about how their techniques have now been adopted by the Tea Party movement. From Michael Moore to "Wall-E," he argues that, although the left has been successful at transforming American culture, when it comes to practical change, it's been woefully unsuccessful.
Source: Times Higher Education
Aug 25, 2011
David Starkey should not be referred to as a historian when he makes media appearances as a pundit on matters outside his area of expertise because it brings the "profession into disrepute", according to a letter signed by 100 of his peers.In the letter in today's Times Higher Education, academics criticise the "reductionist argument" made by Dr Starkey during his recent appearance on BBC Two's Newsnight, when he said that the UK riots were caused because "the whites have become black".Such a claim is "both evidentially insupportable and factually wrong", the letter says.Particular ire is reserved for the BBC for introducing Dr Starkey as a historian when inviting him to comment on matters outside his historical specialism, which is British constitutional history in the Tudor period....
Source: Civil War Memory
Aug 25, 2011
Kevin Levin writes for Civil War Memory.Over the past three days I’ve come across two references that place Robert K. Krick, squarely in the camp of Southern historians. The reference is meant not simply to denote field of interest but a “pro-South” or “pro-Confederate” bias. As many of you know Krick worked for 31 years as the chief historian at Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park. These claims are made with apparently no attempt at verification; it’s as if his body of scholarship speaks for itself in terms of his place of birth. Of course, Krick is not native to the South; rather he was born and raised in California. Before proceeding let’s be clear that Krick’s work on the Army of Northern Virginia is essential reading for any Civil War enthusiast. In short, few people know more about Lee’s army than Krick.
Source: New York Daily News
Aug 25, 2011
A Funky fresh Fordham University professor is rapping about rent to warn the Bronx about gentrification. But housing and census experts believe the borough has nothing to fear.Mark Naison, who rhymes under the stage name Notorious PhD, [performed] "Not in the Bronx" Thursday at the Urban Plunge, an annual community service event just for Fordham freshmen.The history scholar has watched yuppies and hipsters transform parts of Brooklyn and Harlem, crowding out longtime residents and wants Fordham students to help protect the Bronx....
Source: San Fernando Valley Sun
Aug 25, 2011
Polish Jews faced a cruel destiny in 1940. Nazis soldiers had crammed more than 400,000 Jewish citizens into 1.3 square miles of territory known as the Warsaw Ghetto. From there they would be taken by trains to death camps.Left in ruin, with faltering spirits, shattered hope and deteriorating health, the people of the ghetto began collecting all kinds of information to document their history for the future. The group was called the Oneg Shabes -- Joy of Sabbath group. It was organized by a history professor who was an underground leader and social worker in the ghetto named Emanuel Ringelblum.Their work came to be known as the Ringelblum archives. They contained, among other things, underground newspapers, public notices by the Jewish council, stolen Nazi propaganda and poetry, which was all illegal to write and possess under penalty of death."I thought it would be very interesting to look at the Yiddish poetry," said Sarah Moskovitz, professor emeritus at California State University, Northridge who compiled poems from the Warsaw ghetto into a new online book, "Poetry in Hell."
Source: Gainsville Times
Aug 24, 2011
Growing up during the Cold War made the young Martin Blackwell wonder what the world was hiding."I wanted to know what life was like behind the Iron Curtain," he said. "I traveled a lot as a kid and what struck me as unfair was that these kids (in the Soviet Union) couldn't travel."Several years later, Blackwell's appreciation for Russian culture resulted in one of the first academic journals about the country's post-World War II society.The journal, "Contemporary History of Russia," is intended to create a spirit of collaboration between foreign and Russian scholars and to understand the big picture of society in post-WWII Russia....
Source: Yale University Press Release
Aug 24, 2011
NEW HAVEN, Connecticut—Eminent scholars from the United States, Canada and Europe will gather at Yale for a centennial symposium on Franz Boas, the public intellectual who established the idea that people of every color and from every corner of the world can contribute to modern life.“Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas” takes place Sept. 15–17—one hundred years after Boas released The Mind of Primitive Man, a landmark treatise that drew upon Boas’ studies of American Indians and immigrants to reject the idea that race determines ability and present a new theory of culture for a global age. The symposium brings together scholars involved in a reevaluation of the “father of modern anthropology,” who influenced thinkers from John Dewey to W. E. B. Du Bois, presaged the development of Africana studies, and advanced the cause of native rights.
Source: Lewis McCrary at the American Conservative
Aug 23, 2011
Lewis McCrary is a TAC senior editor....In May, Drew Faust, president of Harvard and an acclaimed Civil War historian, was invited to Washington to deliver the National Endowment for the Humanities’ prestigious Jefferson Lecture. While some lecturers shy away from controversy, Faust seemed to relish the opportunity to atone for her predecessor Larry Summers’s sins of political incorrectness.Faust properly observed that the purposes for going to war are often muddled, reminding the audience of the Bush administration’s rush to Iraq after 9/11. But then the real enemies of history were in her sights. Ron Paul and latter-day advocates of nullification—the former guilty of “declaring Lincoln and the war responsible for arrogations of central power that Tea Party originalists and libertarians are dedicated to overturn”—were classed with “significant segments of the American population, particularly in the South” who “continue to reject the slavery as a fundamental cause of the war…”Reenactors help to enforce this false narrative, said Faust, reflecting on her childhood experience of the Civil War centennial, which took place against the backdrop of the 1960s civil rights movement....
Source: Patch.com
Aug 23, 2011
A Mt. San Jacinto College student was arrested on the Menifee Valley campus after allegedly making a criminal threat against his history professor.The alleged threat occurred Aug. 15 when Beovanni C. Glover, 20, grew upset during the professor's lecture. It was the first day of classes for the fall semester at the campus that serves its surrounding communities. The History 112 class covers U.S. history since 1865.According to a student who did not want to be identified, Glover, whose race was listed as black on his arrest record, grew upset when the introductory lecture shifted to the Civil War and then the Jim Crow laws."He (the teacher) used the 'n' word in context of the lesson," the student told Patch....
Source: JTA
Aug 23, 2011
Historian Ruta Sakowska, one of the world's leading experts on the World War II Warsaw Ghetto, has died.Sakowska died Monday in Warsaw at the age of 89.Sakowska, who was born in Vilnius in 1922, served as director of the Ringelblum Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw....
Source: Kansas City Star
Aug 23, 2011
Allan Meltzer, whose comprehensive “A History of the Federal Reserve” has made him a particularly adept Fed analyst and critic, will receive the 2011 Truman Medal for Economic Policy in October.The medal, awarded every two years, recognizes Meltzer’s career in economic policy development, research and education. Meltzer also has served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisors and Economic Policy Advisory Board, and he was chairman of the International Financial Institution Advisory Committee that proposed reforms to the International Monetary Fund.Meltzer is a professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research....
Source: St. Louis Review
Aug 22, 2011
Father William Barnaby Faherty, the well-known Jesuit historian and author, died Aug. 22 at St. Louis University Hospital. He was 96 and had been a Jesuit for nearly 80 years.A funeral Mass will be celebrated at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 24, at St. Francis Xavier "College" Church, Lindell and Grand boulevards in Midtown St. Louis. Visitation will precede the Mass from 4 to 7 p.m. at the College Church.Despite declining health, Father Faherty, the prolific author of more than 40 books in several genres, was working on a book about early St. Louis Archbishop Peter Kenrick at the time of his death.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Aug 20, 2011
Sir Roy Strong was preparing to give a speech at Hereford Cathedral when he realised he felt so unwell that he needed to sit down and gather his strength. This had nothing to do with nerves.A seasoned writer and broadcaster, not to mention former director of the Victoria & Albert Museum (1973-1987) and National Portrait Gallery (1967-73), he was undaunted by public speaking. No, this was far more serious – he felt dizzy, listless and extremely tired. ‘I thought I had summer influenza, but a week later, despite having taken over-the-counter cold remedies, I realised this thing wasn’t going away,’ says Sir Roy, 76, speaking at his Herefordshire home. ‘I arranged to see my GP and after checking he said, “You have a pulse rate of 160 and I need to get you to the County Hospital in Hereford within the hour.”’...
