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: CS Monitor
Jun 14, 2011
A society can make progress only if its young people know of the progress their country has made so far. In America, that means fourth-graders should be able to identify Abraham Lincoln – only 9 percent can. High school seniors must know about the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education – only 2 percent do.
Source: Asia News
Jun 14, 2011
Tripoli – Even though Italy entered the war providing only limited military and logistical support, it now leads 30 per cent of the operations against Libya, on par with France and Great Britain, journalist and historian Angelo Del Boca told AsiaNews. For the Libya expert, “the war goes one amid widespread disinterest, especially in Italy, despite the huge costs and the unwillingness to find a diplomatic solution.”
Source: NYT
Jun 14, 2011
American students are less proficient in their nation’s history than in any other subject, according to results of a nationwide test released on Tuesday, with most fourth graders unable to say why Abraham Lincoln was an important figure and few high school seniors able to identify China as the North Korean ally that fought American troops during the Korean War.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jun 13, 2011
"My name is Barack Obama, of the Moneygall Obamas, and I've come home to find the apostrophe we lost somewhere along the way," joked the US president when he visited Ireland en route to the UK last month. Like John F Kennedy and Ronald Reagan before him, Obama was just another US president embracing his Celtic heritage. And the practice isn't just for those looking for a vote-winner: Yankees have always loved to talk up their Irish blood – and Scottish, too. But Americans celebrating their Englishness? That's not quite so common.
Source: Salon
Jun 13, 2011
When Harriet Beecher Stowe published "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1852, the American slave trade was a thriving institution. The courts condoned it and, as Southerners were quick to claim, so did the Constitution and the Bible. Twelve American presidents had been slave owners, and the abolitionist movement was fragmented and marginal.
Source: NJ Courier News Editorial Board
Jun 13, 2011
We hope that when former Rutgers University president and future $335,000-a-year history professor Richard L. McCormick sits down to write his “What I did this summer” essay, it includes some soul-searching, and a sense that he should turn down the gig or do it for a whole lot less money.It's absurd that the retiring university president will earn so much to be a history professor. After stepping down as president next year, McCormick will take a year off — while being paid handsomely — before returning to the school as a history teacher.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jun 12, 2011
The Egyptians who poured into the streets of their cities early this year were well aware that they were making history. "In 10 years, when I see my children studying Egyptian history, I want to say: 'I was there,'" Ahmad, a young demonstrator on his way into Tahrir Square, told me on February 4, a week before President Hosni Mubarak was driven from office.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jun 12, 2011
It was 5:30 a.m. when Edward L. Ayers received the e-mail. No hello. No signature. Just a forwarded copy of Gov. Robert F. McDonnell's Confederate History Month proclamation.
Source: LA Times
Jun 10, 2011
No, not the research scientists — the newly minted Ph.D.'s in art history. What kinds of art, past and present and from around the globe, are of pressing interest?The answer is: mostly Modern art, mostly from North America and Europe. The 21st century is scrutinizing the century that preceded it.According to lists compiled by the College Art Association, a venerable professional group whose membership includes the vast majority of American academics in the field, the most-studied area for doctoral candidates in the U.S. and Canada last year — by a long shot — was art made in roughly the last 100 years. Paul Klee, Eduardo Paolozzi and Kazimir Malevich were among the subjects of 67 doctoral dissertations in the category.The 29 categories listed by CAA range alphabetically from "African (Sub-Saharan)" to "World Art," a cross-cultural, transnational discipline. Twentieth century painting, sculpture, design and other art had 50% more doctoral dissertations accepted in 2010 than the next most popular field....
Source: NYT
Jun 10, 2011
William E. Dodd was an academic historian, living a quiet life in Chicago, when Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him United States ambassador to Germany. It was 1933, Hitler had recently been appointed chancellor, the world was about to change.
Source: NYT
Jun 9, 2011
Boston College filed a motion this week to quash a federal subpoena seeking access to confidential interviews of paramilitary fighters for the Provisional Irish Republican Army.
Source: Salon
Jun 9, 2011
Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large.On the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, Americans are engaged in new debates over what it was about. Southern revisionists have long tried to claim it wasn't about slavery, but rather "Northern aggression" – which is a tough sell since they seceded from the Union despite Lincoln's attempts at compromise on slavery, and then attacked the federal Fort Sumter in South Carolina. That would be Southern aggression, by any standard.
Source: University of Texas News
Jun 7, 2011
AUSTIN, Texas — Jeremi Suri, an acclaimed scholar of international history, has been named the first holder of the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law and has received a joint appointment at the Lyndon B.
Source: WaPo
Jun 7, 2011
“It’s not only our local politicians,” said Bernard Demczuk, a professor of African American and D.C. history at George Washington University, and for many years a political aide to Barry when he was mayor. “It’s John Edwards and Anthony Weiner, too. It’s a much more attuned and demanding citizenry powered by new media and social media.”Although the alleged improprieties took place before Gray assumed office, some say his failure to fully address the accusations has paralyzed his administration.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 7, 2011
Luciano Buso claims to have found Giotto di Bondone's signature hidden in the 14ft-long, sepia-coloured burial cloth, as well as the number 15.The historian believes that the number is a reference to 1315, and that the artist was commissioned in that year to come up with an exact copy of the relic because the original was badly damaged after centuries of being hawked around the Holy Land and Europe.
Source: Politico
Jun 7, 2011
POLITICO historian-in-residence James Hohmann spots something of a precedent for Tim Pawlenty's economic address today in Chicago — a speech heavy on big policy promises that could easily have unforeseen political consequences. Hohmann emails:Ronald Reagan also chose Chicago to deliver a economic policy speech in September 1975 as part of his primary challenge against President Gerald Ford.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jun 7, 2011
Oxford University has formally declared it has "no confidence" in the policies of the universities minister, David Willetts, in the first sign of a concerted academic backlash against the government's higher education reforms.
Source: The First Post (UK)
Jun 7, 2011
AC Grayling's new 'private university', announced on Sunday amid great fanfare as a rival to Oxbridge, finds itself mired just two days later in allegations of plagiarism and elitism - with one of its star professors, Richard Dawkins, taking time to distance himself from it, and a student protest planned for later today.
Source: Middle East Forum
Jun 7, 2011
PHILADELPHIA – Efraim Karsh today becomes director of the Middle East Forum. Daniel Pipes, who founded the Middle East Forum in 1994 and has served as its director since, assumes the presidency of the Forum, a new, full-time position.
Source: Providence Business News
Jun 6, 2011
PROVIDENCE – The Rhode Island Historical Society announced Friday that C. Morgan Grefe will be its new executive director as of June 13, the first woman to fill the role.Grefe will take over for Michael Gerhardt, who has filled the position on an interim basis since March, when Bernard Fishman resigned.Grefe was the director of the Newell D. Goff Center for Education and Public Programs at the society since 2005. She is also an adjunct assistant professor of history at the University of Rhode Island.
