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: Voice of America
Jan 25, 2011
...Tunisia scholar Kenneth Perkins, professor of history at the University of South Carolina, says “it is true that Tunisia’s economy appeared to be prosperous, but while some people benefitted, many outside Tunis, in remote areas, did not see the results of Tunisia’s prosperity.”
Author of A History of Modern Tunisia, Tunisia: Crossroads of the Islamic and European Worlds and Historical Dictionary of Tunisia, Perkins says one example is students who completed university degrees but
Source: Parker Spitzer (CNN)
Jan 24, 2011
ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering our five OFF-SET questions is historian Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and a contributing editor at Vanity fair magazine.
Anne Brinkley
In his new book, “The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom, 1879 – 1960,” Brinkley documents the battle to save the “wild Alaska” – Mount McKinley, the Tongass and Chugach National Forests, Glacier Bay, and the Coastal Plain of the Beaufort Sea, among other treasured areas—from
Source: Newsweek
Jan 24, 2011
If President Obama’s planned “call to unity” and pledge to work on centrist initiatives in his second State of the Union speech don’t have you itching to tune in Tuesday night, don’t feel too bad. Not many of your fellow citizens will watch, and even if they do, they’re unlikely to remember what it was they heard....
“They’re not defining moments for presidents,” says Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton. “There are a few times when the way events u
Source: NYT
Jan 24, 2011
Just hours before Abraham Lincoln “put on his hat and headed for Ford’s Theater,” on April 14, 1865, the president is said to have spared a mentally incompetent Army private the death penalty for desertion.
The legendary act of compassion was revealed by Thomas Lowry, an amateur historian, who said he found the pardon among hundreds of untapped Lincoln documents in the National Archives in 1998 and described it in a book the following year. His discovery was hailed by scholars as on
Source: NARA
Jan 24, 2011
Washington, DC…Archivist of the United States David S. Ferriero announced today that Thomas Lowry, a long-time Lincoln researcher from Woodbridge, VA, confessed on January 12, 2011, to altering an Abraham Lincoln Presidential pardon that is part of the permanent records of the U.S. National Archives. The pardon was for Patrick Murphy, a Civil War soldier in the Union Army who was court-martialed for desertion.
Lowry admitted to changing the date of Murphy’s pardon, written in Lincol
Source: NYT
Jan 22, 2011
AS the states dream up budget plans for a new year, some find themselves staring at deficits in the billions of dollars, vanishing federal stimulus funds, mounting health care costs, their own struggling cities and a canyon of underfunded pension liabilities ahead....
As it happens, the most recent such collapse occurred during the Great Depression, when Arkansas found itself, in the words of one state historian, “plain, flat broke.” There are familiar threads then and now, not leas
Source: Jesse Lemisch, in The Nation
Jan 21, 2011
[Jesse Lemisch is professor emeritus of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.]
With a knee problem and a chic all-black walker, I have found more and more New York City cabs inaccessible. The new hybrids are good for anti-pollution but are perilously high off the ground, with difficult sliding doors. Drivers are as helpful as they can be—many come from immigrant cultures friendly to older people—but, spotting my walker, many pass me by,
Source: WaPo
Jan 20, 2011
Forbes writer Rick Ungar is getting some attention for a piece arguing that history shows that John Adams supported a strong Federal role in health care. Ungar argues that Adams even championed an early measure utilizing the concept behind the individual mandate, which Tea Partyers say is uncon
Source: Newark Advocate
Jan 19, 2011
NEWARK -- Mitch Lerner's classroom in Ohio State University at Newark's Reese Center looked a little bit different Tuesday morning.
Two giant light stands, two cameras and a Columbus-based film crew filled half of the room, taping a lecture titled, "The Roots of Progressive Reform," for the C-SPAN program, "Lectures in History."
"I had not anticipated such an impressive (display)," Lerner told his freshman history class. "When I'm a bi
Source: The Atlanta Post
Jan 18, 2011
He’ll rack up on the speakers’ circuit. He’s one of the world’s most gift orators. So, money won’t be an issue.
Neither will his age. When he leaves the ...White House — in either 2013, or 2017, at the age of 52 or 56, depending on the outcome of the next election — he will still have a dangerous jump-shot and a bop in his walk, and his children will still be youngsters.
“He’ll be a relatively young ex-President, so he’ll have a long career,” said Alan Brinkley, a histo
Source: NYT
Jan 17, 2011
A promotional trailer for “The Kennedys,” a multimillion-dollar mini-series prepared for the History channel, suggests it will offer a sweeping inside look at the backrooms and bedrooms of that political clan. There are stylized re-enactments of the life of President John F. Kennedy and his family, and a title card that reads, “Behind the public image lies the story of an American dynasty.”...
n February a group of historians organized by a liberal filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, issue
Source: Institute for the Study of the Americas
Jan 17, 2011
In 1960, US political scientist Richard Neustadt began his seminal book, Presidential Power,
with the observation: “In the United States we like to ‘rate’ a President. We measure him as
‘weak’ or ‘strong’ and call what we are measuring his ‘leadership.’” In the half century since
then, systematic presidential rating has become a regular exercise for US scholars. Over the
same period, study and research of US history and politics expanded dramatically in UK
universities. Until no
Source: Trend (Azerbaijan)
Jan 17, 2011
Former general secretary of the Communist Party of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, must take the primary responsibility for the 20 January tragedy, he should be punished in accordance with international law, doctor of historical sciences, Professor Jamil Hasanli, told Trend.
"It should be noted that this issue was discussed at the Politburo, which was considered the supreme organ of the Party, and the defense ministry was directly instructed to enforce this decision, and Baku was
Source: CHE
Jan 16, 2011
Beginning 35 years ago, members of the Hmong hill tribe from Laos have resettled as refugees in the United States. Now a Hmong-American historian offers a rare scholarly insider’s look at their experience.
In Hmong America: Reconstructing Community in Diaspora (University of Illinois Press), Chia Youyee Vang traces the path of the Hmong from the highlands of Laos, where they were embroiled in the conflict between pro-Communist and U.S.-backed anti-Communist forces, to resettlement.
Source: Washington Examiner
Jan 16, 2011
Craig Shirley, a Washington public affairs executive and author of two books on President Reagan, says the former president's son has no evidence to base his allegation that his father was afflicted by Alzheimer's Disease as early as his first term in the White House.
"Ronald Reagan deeply loved his son, Ronald Prescott and indeed all of his children. He demonstrated that love in countless ways throughout his life. If one reads President Reagan's diaries from 1981 until 1989, t
Source: Guardian (UK)
Jan 16, 2011
Hampstead Heath, in leafy north London, is proud of its walk-on part in the history of Marxism. It was here, on a Sunday, that Karl Marx would walk his family up Parliament Hill, reciting Shakespeare and Schiller along the way, for an afternoon of picnics and poetry. On a weekday, he would join his friend Friedrich Engels, who lived close by, for a brisk hike around the heath, where the"old Londoners", as they were known, mulled over the Paris Commune, the Second International and the nature of
Source: World Mag
Jan 15, 2011
Daniel Pipes founded the Middle East Forum in 1994. The author of 12 books, with a Ph.D. in medieval Islamic history, he is the most prominent American scholar of radical Islam; even CBS said he was"years ahead of the curve" in identifying the radical threat.Many people associate Islam with terrorism, but you also examine a long-term threat that would be peaceful but transformative. In this country, mostly because of 9/11, we focus on terrorism, but in Europe the
Source: Politico
Jan 14, 2011
Two weeks after President Barack Obama returned from a Hawaiian vacation spent reading a 900-page biography of Ronald Reagan, he delivered a speech in Tucson, Ariz., Wednesday that incorporated, but didn’t parrot, the gilded, common-touch oratory of the 40th president.
The pageantry and patter of the Oval Office that came so naturally to Reagan and Bill Clinton haven’t come quite as easily to Obama, an electrifying campaign performer who is finally mastering the intimate, idiosyncra
Source: US News & World Report
Jan 14, 2011
...Before World War II, about 25 percent of Americans were in multigenerational households. After the war, rising affluence and a mobile society led to a steady decline. "In 2008, an estimated 49 million Americans, or 16 percent of the total U.S. population, lived in a family household that contained at least two adult generations or a grandparent and at least one other generation," the Pew Research Center reported in a study last year. "In 1980, this figure was just 28 million, o
Source: FoneHome (UK)
Jan 14, 2011
...[I]t’s an interactive book on the subject of, you guessed it, the war in the Pacific....
...The whole app has been compiled by Richard Overy, Professor of History at the University of Exeter. You can’t get much more credible than that. It’s a fresh new move from one of the best iPhone game makers out there, and is available now for £5.99.
