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
Nov 5, 2010
...“There’s a strong strand of divine-guidance thinking, thinking about American exceptionalism,” said Mary Beth Norton, a professor of early American history at Cornell University. “People have certainly seen the texts of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as the equivalent of a secular religion, with the idea then that you can’t challenge these texts.”...
If anything, the Constitution is especially vulnerable to literalism. “There is a major translation problem f
Source: NYT
Nov 5, 2010
...[N]ew findings contradict the conventional belief that Italians began to enforce anti-Semitic laws only after German troops occupied the country in 1943, and then reluctantly. In a spate of studies, many of them based on a little-publicized Italian government report commissioned in 1999, researchers have uncovered a vast wartime record detailing a systematic disenfranchisement of Italy’s Jews, beginning in the summer of 1938, shortly before the Kristallnacht attacks in November....
Source: NYT
Nov 3, 2010
“Square,” “colorless,” “stodgy,” “unthreatening.” Those are some of the adjectives that the prolific journalist and historian Garry Wills uses to describe himself in “Outside Looking In,” his pointillistic new memoir.
Off the page, all those things may (or may not) be true. On it, as countless politicians and writers have learned, having Mr. Wills sternly contemplate your work can be like having the Red Baron on your tail. “Unthreatening” is hardly the word. Writing in The New York
Source: Newswire Canada
Nov 3, 2010
WINNIPEG, Nov. 3 /CNW/ - Steady scholarship, dry wit and an appetite for public debate are the qualities that have made Professor Desmond Morton this year's winner of the Pierre Berton Award, Canada's History Society announced today. Desmond Morton's incisive analysis and quiet chuckle have raised interest in and knowledge of Canadian history from coast-to-coast.
The author of over 40 books on military, political, and labour history in Canada including two enduring popular works:
Source: UC Berkeley News
Nov 2, 2010
BERKELEY — Susanna I. Barrows, a professor emerita of history at the UC Berkeley, and an authority on modern French history, died at her home in Berkeley on Wednesday, Oct. 27, after a suspected heart attack. She was 65.
A sparkling essayist whose work was widely published in French and English, Barrows wrote in a romantic tradition, going back to French historian Jules Michelet, in which "the people" are the heroes of their own liberation. She found their voices and their
Source: UPI
Nov 1, 2010
URBANA-CHAMPAIGN, Ill., Nov. 1 (UPI) -- A 19th-century railroad doomed a black-founded western Illinois town by diverting routes around it, an archaeologist who studied its history says.
New Philadelphia, Ill., was "the first town in the United States planned and legally registered by an African-American," writes University of Illinois Professor Chris Fennell in the journal Historical Archaeology....
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Nov 1, 2010
ST. LOUIS (RNS) In 2003, Norman Gershman was looking for some of the righteous.
What he found astonished the investment banker-turned-photographer, and led him toward a project now on display in a St. Louis synagogue....
During the years of occupation, 10 times as many Jews streamed into Albania to escape persecution from Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Greece and Italy. Gershman says it was the only country in Europe where the Jewish population grew by the end of t
Source: LoHud.com
Nov 1, 2010
OYSTER BAY, N.Y. — It's one thing to read about Teddy Roosevelt's exploits as big-game hunter, Rough Rider in the Spanish-American War, blue-blooded intellectual, and chest-beating, turn-of-the-century president.
It's another to look into the eyes of a 1,200-pound African Cape Buffalo that he brought down....
"He wasn't just the 26th president of the United States, but a real man with many exciting sides to his life," said Eileen McGaghran, who teaches history
Source: Korea Herald
Nov 1, 2010
Sohn Pow-key, an archeologist who proved humans were living on the Korean Peninsula during the Paleolithic Age by excavating related artifacts, died in Seoul on Sunday. He was 88....
From 1964 to 1974 when he was professor of history at Yonsei University and head of the university’s museum, Sohn excavated Paleolithic tools at Seokjang-ri in Gongju, South Chungcheong Province. It was the first archeological proof that prehistoric people lived on the Korean Peninsula. Sohn led 12 exca
Source: The Atlantic
Nov 1, 2010
When Diane Ravitch decided that reform ideas like robust testing, charter schools, and No Child Left Behind were imperiling rather than saving American education, she managed to break with her former Republican allies and start a fight with Obama Democrats, all at once....
Teachers unions and some civil-rights groups sounded these alarms before Ravitch did. But her sharp writing and mastery of history (she’s an education professor and historian at New York University) mean that no o
Source: Workday Minnesota
Oct 31, 2010
WASHINGTON - U.S. labor law “has been turned inside out, protecting the powerful rather than the powerless” in the 75 years since the National Labor Relations Act was enacted, a top labor historian says.
“And by that standard, it’s a failure,” adds James A. Gross of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
Gross was the most provocative of many speakers at the opening Oct. 27 session of a day-and-a-half conference commemorating the 75th anniversa
Source: WaPo
Oct 31, 2010
W hen the young Edward Ayers left his Tennessee home for Yale to study history, his mama asked him why. "You already know what happened," she said.
But history, Ayers already knew, is best understood through the lens of time. History is always changing.
Now that he's president of the University of Richmond, he's become an agent of that change. As a leader of Richmond's sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War, he hopes to reshape America's understandin
Source: Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Oct 31, 2010
Ancient cultures used the swastika in artwork and design centuries before it became the nefarious symbol of Nazi Germany.
Matthew Hyland, professor of history at Duquesne University, said the symbol dates to Neolithic times — as far back as 3,000 years — and mainly was a symbol of good luck.
"Essentially, it's like a good luck charm, sort of a portentous symbol of good feelings," he said.
Hyland said archeologists found the swastika design on anci
Source: Magic Valley Times-News
Oct 31, 2010
Fifteen years ago, a Canadian cultural historian named Nicholas Rogers published an essay in the journal Social History entitled “Halloween in Urban North America: Liminality and Hyperreality.”
Sound boring? Just the opposite.
Rogers, a professor of history at Toronto’s York University, spoke truth to power about All Hallows’ Eve: Stop trying to transform one of the few remaining cultural events that’s actually fun into yet another politically correct, risk-averse, reli
Source: Jerusalem Post
Oct 31, 2010
JAN T. GROSS BEGINS HIS keynote lecture by projecting an old photograph onto the screen behind him. He promises to talk about it at the end of the presentation, knowing that the picture, ostensibly a somewhat commonplace snapshot of Polish peasants resting on their tools behind their harvested crops, is disturbing. The picture is fuzzy, and the lunar-like landscape is too desolate, the harvest is too meager, the colors are too gray.
The overflow audience at Yad Vashem listens intent
Source: Abilene Reflector-Chronicle
Oct 31, 2010
A lively but civil discussion about the Tea Party Movement, how it began and potential impacts in the 2010 elections and beyond, drew about 100 people to the Visitors Center of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum Thursday night.
Deputy director Tim Rives put together a program to discuss “The Tea Party and the Future of American Politics.”
“The Tea Party is one of the most important political developments of modern times,” said Karl Wesissenbach, director of
Source: NYT
Oct 31, 2010
...Defying a culture of clean that has prevailed at least since the 1940s, a contingent of renegades deliberately forgoes daily bathing and other gold standards of personal hygiene, like frequent shampooing and deodorant use.
To the converted, there are many reasons to cleanse less and smell more like yourself. “We don’t need to wash the way we did when we were farmers,” said Katherine Ashenburg, 65, the author of “The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History.” Since the advent of cars
Source: Alternet
Oct 30, 2010
What happened to the dream of Barack Obama's transformational politics? There's been very little deviation from the disastrous Bush years on the key issues of war, empire and the distribution of wealth in the country.
I turned to Lawrence Goodwyn, historian of social movements whose books and methods of explaining history have had a profound influence on many of the best known authors, activists and social theorists of our time. Goodwyn's account of the Populist movement, Democratic
Source: BBC News
Oct 30, 2010
...Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at Bristol University, says Paganism is partly a reaction to a perceived discrimination against women, practised by mainstream religions.
He says: "It's feminist. Women have an automatic place... and in some areas of Paganism they are actually in charge. And they're working with a goddess or goddesses who are just as powerful as gods, if not more so."
...It originated among ancient Celts for whom the natural world was a w
Source: NYT
Oct 29, 2010
As a presidential historian and emeritus professor at Northwestern, you’re well aware that the Democrats are facing the likelihood of an electoral setback this Tuesday. Yet President Obama continues to be the object of scathing criticism among Democrats, including yourself. Why won’t you give him credit for getting things done?
He gets things done in a very crippled way. The health care plan and the finance plan — he made so many bargains along the way.
