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: NYT
Apr 1, 2011
For two decades, the Columbia University professor Manning Marable focused on the task he considered his life’s work: redefining the legacy of Malcolm X. Last fall he completed “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention,” a 594-page biography described by the few scholars who have seen it as full of new and startling information and insights.
The book is scheduled to be published on Monday, and Mr. Marable had been looking forward to leading a vigorous public discussion of his ideas. But on
Source: The Atlantic
Apr 1, 2011
It’s a sunbaked afternoon, and Sergeant First Class Andrew Ishmael is in Paktika province in eastern Afghanistan, near the Pakistan border, talking with Sergeant Jeremy Lindholm, a mechanic with a South Dakota National Guard route-clearance unit, about the day he drove over an anti-tank mine. “Take me through what happened,” Ishmael says. Lindholm, still wearing an arm cast from the attack, recounts the roar and flash of the explosion, and the flames from the ruptured gas tank creeping into the
Source: Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette
Mar 31, 2011
“Well-behaved women seldom make history.”
That now famous quote (by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich) is affixed to Christine Erickson’s office door at IPFW, where she is an associate history professor.
Last year, Erickson says, someone scribbled a few choice words on the bumper sticker: “That’s because women didn’t do anything important.”
Perhaps the proposed National Women’s History Museum is needed now more than ever.
On Wednesday, a bill th
Source: OAH press release
Mar 30, 2011
The Executive Committee of the Organization of American Historians, led by President Alice Kessler-Harris, R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History at Columbia University, issued a statement on March 30, 2011, supporting academic freedom and deploring the recent efforts of Wisconsin politicians to intimidate OAH member and professor William Cronon. Cronon, a professor of environmental and U.S. western history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been thrust into the spotlight for his March 15
Source: KMOX (MO)
Mar 30, 2011
ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOX) –A local historian says there is no other fan in the nation like a Cardinal fan — and he says the reason is KMOX Radio.
University of Missouri St. Louis Professor of History Emeritus Chuck Korr says Cardinal fans were created decades ago by the Cardinal’s Radio network at a time when there was no other Major League Baseball team south or west of St. Louis.
“You talk to anybody over 40 who’s a Cardinal’s fan and he’ll tell you it’s because of KMOX
Source: Guardian (UK)
Mar 29, 2011
The Harvard academic Niall Ferguson has warned that too few pupils are spending too little time studying history – and what they do study lacks a sweeping narrative.
He offers his own lesson plan to remedy what he says is a lack of cohesion, in which pupils place six "building block" events, including the Reformation and the French revolution, into the right order.
His plan aims to give pupils an overview of the years 1400 to 1914, and encourage them "to
Source: LINKS--International Journal of Socialist Renewal
Mar 28, 2011
On March 27, 2011, prominent US anti-Iraq-War writer Juan Cole posted this"Open letter to the left on Libya" on his website, Informed Comment.The article argued for support for the UN Security Council authorised military intervention in Libya. In the interests of left discussion, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal posts Cole's art
Source: Ron Radosh and Steve Ustin in the Weekly Standard
Mar 28, 2011
[Ronald Radosh is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at The Hudson Institute, and a Prof. Emeritus of History at the City University of New York. Steven T. Usdin is senior editor at Biocentury Publications and the author of "Engineering Communism
How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley"]
Three years ago, Morton Sobell gave an interview to Sam Roberts of the New York Times that surprised readers and stunned many who continued to believe that So
Source: NYT
Mar 27, 2011
The latest technique used by conservatives to silence liberal academics is to demand copies of e-mails and other documents. Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli of Virginia tried it last year with a climate-change scientist, and now the Wisconsin Republican Party is doing it to a distinguished historian who dared to criticize the state’s new union-busting law. These demands not only abuse academic freedom, but make the instigators look like petty and medieval inquisitors.
The histori
Source: NYT
Mar 27, 2011
[Paul Krugman is an economist at Princeton University and a columnist for the NYT.]
...The Cronon affair, then, is one more indicator of just how reflexively vindictive, how un-American, one of our two great political parties has become.
The demand for Mr. Cronon’s correspondence has obvious parallels with the ongoing smear campaign against climate science and climate scientists, which has lately relied heavily on supposedly damaging quotations found in e-mail records..
Source: David A. Walsh at HNN
Mar 25, 2011
[David A. Walsh is the associate editor of HNN.]MARCH 28 UPDATEMARCH 29 UPDATEThe Wisconsin Republican Party is filing legal documents to gain access to the personal emails of William Cronon, Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin—Madison and president-elect of the American Historical Association, in response to
Source: AP
Mar 24, 2011
Foner's "The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery" is one of three winners of the coveted Bancroft Prize for history. The prize's administrator, Columbia University, announced Thursday that the other recipients are Sara Dubow's "Ourselves Unborn" and Christopher Tomlins' "Freedom Bound."...
Source: NYT
Mar 23, 2011
Clashes at state capitols over organized labor have become commonplace this year, with protesters throughout the country objecting to proposed limits on collective bargaining and cuts in benefits. Maine’s governor, Paul LePage, has opened a new — and unlikely — front in the battle between some lawmakers and unions: a 36-foot-wide mural in the state’s Department of Labor building in Augusta.
The three-year-old mural has 11 panels showing scenes of Maine workers, including colonial-er
Source: NYT
Mar 23, 2011
But another city, Memphis, appears to have the distinction of having once lost the highest percentage of its population for an American city of any size.
In the 1870s, a series of outbreaks of yellow fever swept through the Mississippi River Valley, killing thousands of people. In 1878, the epidemic reduced the population of Memphis by perhaps as much as 50 percent.
In 1878 alone, the population of about 40,000 dropped by more than half, said Charles W. Crawford, a prof
Source: Time.com
Mar 22, 2011
At first glance, it seems like an ordinary, innocent photograph: a group of Polish peasants holding shovels in a field on a sunny day. But look closer and you see the skulls and bones scattered at their feet.
According to some historians, the photo was taken at the site of the Treblinka death camp in eastern Poland shortly after World War II and shows the peasants digging up Jewish remains in search of gold or other valuables. When it ran alongside a 2008 newspaper feature about Pol
Source: ABC News
Mar 21, 2011
Noted Civil War historian James Robertson is retiring after more than four decades at Virginia Tech.
The 80-year-old Robertson will leave his job June 1. He founded the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech in 1999 and has served as its director....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Mar 20, 2011
The condition that affected Peter the Wild Boy, a feral child found abandoned in a German forest and kept as a pet at the courts of George I and II, has been identified more than 200 years after his death.
Peter's charming smile, seen in his portrait painted in the 1720s by William Kent on the king's grand staircase at Kensington Palace, was the vital clue.
Lucy Worsley, the historian at Historic Royal Palaces who has been researching Peter's strange life, suspected fro
Source: HNN Staff
Mar 20, 2011
[David A. Walsh is the associate editor of HNN.]The Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians closed in Houston this Sunday morning with a whimper, and as the final tally for the convention was estimated at 1,317, OAH officials could not help but express mild disappointment. “It’s a bit of a letdown,” OAH executive director Katherine Finley said, “but not unexpected in this economy. We had projected 1,400 to 1,500 attendees, so we’re only short by one hundred.”
Source: National Review
Mar 18, 2011
Winter is bleak enough as it is. This year the gloom was deepened by the publication of How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, by Eric Hobsbawm, one of Britain’s most feted historians, and, oh yes, a man who stuck with the Communist party until 1991 despite a global killing spree that took perhaps one hundred million lives. Naturally Hobsbawm’s new book has triggered the usual hosannas from the usual congregation for, to quote the Guardian, this “grand old man.”...
But
Source: Yahoo News
Mar 17, 2011
LONDON (Reuters) – Saint Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, probably ate fare similar to today's pricey health foods such as cereal, fish and seaweed, according to a researcher who has studied the country's 5th century diet.
Food historian Regina Sexton said records kept by monks showed that Patrick, who is credited with ridding Ireland of snakes and spreading the Christian message, most likely drew his sustenance from cereals and dairy produce such as sour milk, flavored curd mi
