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: Irish Examiner
Dec 11, 2010
THE son of a German man who fought against his father’s own country during WWI and who later joined the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ADRIC), has been identified as the man who organised the burning of Cork 90 years ago today.
Charles Schulze, who had served as a captain in the Dorsetshire Regiment during WWI, led Auxiliaries on a rampage of burning as a reprisal for an IRA ambush which left a colleague dead and 15 injured....
Historian Jim Herlih
Source: Atlanta Examiner
Dec 11, 2010
Across the former Confederacy, preparations are under way for the 150th anniversary of the U.S. Civil War. South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union, December 20, 1860. And while many organizations are working to incorporate both the black and the white experience, there are complaints that most events will glorify the Antebellum South and the Lost Cause while overlooking the major reason for the war: slavery....
Mark Simpson, commander of the South Carolina Div
Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Dec 11, 2010
...The unpublished sketches of famed African-American editorial cartoonist Chester Commodore as he struggled to get President Richard Nixon’s nose and President George W. Bush’s ears just right....
....On Friday at the University of Chicago’s Joseph Regenstein Library, researchers unveiled a new website intended to make it easy for the public and scholars alike to locate these African-American artifacts as well as a host of others in the city from the same period in history....
Source: Star Tribune
Dec 10, 2010
Step inside the Bartholomew House in Richfield, and the decades slip away. You're in the cramped, maze-like rooms of a pioneer home, built when Wood Lake -- now separated from the house by buzzing traffic on Lyndale Avenue -- was a place to hunt.
The 1852 house is filled with period pieces like cast-iron stoves, a chair with cowhorn arms and art made of twisted hair. But exactly what is the story the house is trying to tell?
"The story of Richfield," said Sara
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Dec 8, 2010
The German critic Walter Benjamin once gave a set of satirical pointers about how to write fat books -- for example, by making the same point repeatedly, giving numerous examples of the same thing, and writing a long introduction to outline the project, then reminding the reader of the plan as often as possible. Whether or not they are aware of doing so, many academic authors seem to follow his advice closely. Samuel Moyn's The Last Utopia: Human Rights in Histor
Source: WaPo
Dec 8, 2010
IN LONDON The first sign that something is awry inside the venerable halls of University College London is a fresh red scrawl on the side of the regal entrance that simply reads, "Join the fight."
Inside, Ellen Evans, a 20-year-old English major, was doing just that, standing among sleeping bags and clothes strewn on the floor of an "occupied" auditorium. Along with tens of thousands of other British students who have undergone a political awakening in recent mo
Source: Washington Examiner
Dec 8, 2010
As angry Democrats beat a path to television cameras Wednesday to denounce a White House tax compromise with Republicans, President Obama was making a show of being presidential....
"He is certainly straining to prove that he is tough," said Matt Mackowiak, a Republican strategist. "But there is a real threat to the White House now in that it is officially open season on the administration from the left and the right....
"The key risk in all of this
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 7, 2010
...Chinese students tend to spend less time on sport and other activities which are not core components of the "gaokao", a set of exams that determines their place at university, and indeed in life.
The pressure of the gaokao has been blamed for a lack of creativity in China by some critics. Xu Jilin, a professor of history at East China Normal University, whose son is at a Shanghai middle school, wrote in October that "this rigid examination system has created an exa
Source: CNN.com
Dec 7, 2010
OFF-SET: In this Parker Spitzer blog exclusive, we talk with the noted historian Eric Foner, author of the new book,"The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery."
Foner is a history professor at Columbia University and has written many acclaimed books on the Civil War period, including"Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men."...How different is today's GOP party from the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln?
It could not be more different. Lincoln
Source: Palm Beach Post
Dec 6, 2010
Donald Walter Curl, an original faculty member at Florida Atlantic University and a Florida historian considered the expert on Addison Mizner architecture, died Saturday after battling lymphoma for three years. He was 75.
He is survived by his partner of 30 years, Fred L. Eckel, a niece and two nephews.
Born in East Liberty, Ohio, Curl received his bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Ohio State University, where he studied American history.
He mo
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Dec 6, 2010
David Kiehn has spent most of his life working in film-related jobs. But it wasn't until he made a remarkable discovery - and was featured on "60 Minutes" - that anyone outside the film community took notice.
For years, Kiehn knew about "A Trip Down Market Street," a 12-minute silent film, shot in San Francisco from a cable car. The Library of Congress dated the film to 1905, but Kiehn suspected otherwise. Studying weather reports, vehicle registration records an
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Dec 6, 2010
Jonathan D. Katz's career as an art historian can be framed by controversies over federal support for art that offends some people -- and specifically about art dealing with gay people.
He was working on his dissertation, "Opposition, Incorporated: On the Homosexualization of Post-War American Art," when in 1989 the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in Washington, called off an exhibit of sexually explicit work by Robert Mapplethorpe, amid calls from many conservative lawmakers to
Source: WaPo
Dec 4, 2010
In Washington, shame isn't what it used to be.
That was the lesson of the showdown Thursday between Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) and the rest of the House of Representatives. Rangel's colleagues voted overwhelmingly to censure him for ethics violations - a punishment that included a public scolding in the House chamber.
But Rangel didn't cooperate. The rebuke would only work if he felt ashamed.
And he didn't....
"If you show shame, or
Source: NYT
Dec 4, 2010
Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a
Source: Focus Taiwan
Dec 3, 2010
Taipei, Dec. 3 (CNA) China may jump ahead of Taiwan to publish late President Chiang Kai-shek's diaries as his descendants have yet to reach aconsensus over who has the right to authorize the use of the historical documents, scholars said Friday.
Chinese scholars are known to have been copying Chiang's diaries at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and, according to a professor of history at National Chengchi University, Liu Wei-kai, if China has organized a "group ef
Source: Citizen Times
Dec 1, 2010
Citizen Times: Mr. Pipes, you head various organizations concerning the Middle East and Islam, and are one of the best known American writers on these subjects. How did this all begin for you?Daniel Pipes: I am a historian of Islam with a special interest in the role of Islam in public life. I received my Ph.D. in 1978, just as Ayatollah Khomeini appeared. For the first time in modern history, Islam had a large and obvious role in Wester
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Dec 1, 2010
The University of Minnesota was sued in federal court Tuesday over allegations that a website maintained by its Holocaust studies center defamed a Turkish-American organization in a way that raised First Amendment and due process issues. The suit came just days after the Holocaust center removed the material that is the focus of the suit -- although the university maintains that it acted as part of a routine review and not because of the threat of litigation.
Underlying the legal di
Source: PR Newswire
Dec 1, 2010
MONTGOMERY, Ala., Sept. 30 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In the summer 2008 issue of its Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported that Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, was part of a network of persons, financed by the Government of Turkey, who dispute that the tragic events of World War I constituted an Armenian genocide. We now realize that we misunderstood Professor Lewy's scholarship, were wrong to assert that he was part of a network fi
Source: Press Release
Dec 1, 2010
In 1990, members of the Colonial Society established a prize of two thousand five hundred dollars, in memory of Walter Muir Whitehill, for many years Editor of Publications for the Colonial Society and the moving force behind the organization. It is be awarded for an outstanding essay on colonial history, not previously published, with preference being given to New England subjects. A distinguished committee of members of the Colonial Society act as judges: Bernard Bailyn, Adams University Profe
Source: NYT
Dec 1, 2010
Although Irving Greenblum, an 81-year-old investor and retired furniture store owner, has four grown sons, he says he is “the last Greenblum who lives in Laredo,” a city on Texas’ border with Mexico.
That is because his sons — three trained as lawyers, one as an architect — have moved away and built their careers in larger Texas cities, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio....
Faced with an economic and social decline, shrinking synagogue membership and the eventual end of ce
