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: Yahoo News
Oct 19, 2010
An iconic silent film starring San Francisco made its debut on "60 Minutes."
"A Trip Down Market Street" has riveting black and white scenes of life in the city before the Big One in 1906. Back then, Market street was little more than a dusty road filled with horse drawn carriages, men in hats and women in Victorian gowns bustling about.
One for the archives, right? Not quite.
According to the Library of Congress, the film was shot in Se
Source: WaPo
Oct 19, 2010
A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War -- a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict.
The passage appears in "Our Virginia: Past and Present," which was distributed in the state's public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has w
Source: NPR
Oct 19, 2010
"Most of the good things that have happened in my life happened because of books," says Pulitzer Prize-winning author, journalist and historian Garry Wills — and that includes meeting his wife. They met on a plane — he was a passenger, she was a flight attendant. She took one look at his book and told him that he was too young to be reading French philosopher Henri Bergson.
"I was a bookworm from the very beginning and to this day," Wills tells NPR's Robert Siege
Source: Justin Snider at the Huffington Post
Oct 19, 2010
[Justin Snider, a contributing editor at The Hechinger Report, teaches undergraduate writing at Columbia University]
In a segment called "Waiting for Superman: Fact or Fiction?" on the BAM! Radio Network, education historian Diane Ravitch and four members of the media (including yours truly) discussed Davis Guggenheim's latest documentary, Waiting for 'Superman'.
Our host, Errol St. Clair Smith, wanted to know whether we thought the film would lead to producti
Source: Black Book Mag
Oct 19, 2010
Fashion stuntwoman Lady Gaga is no stranger to controversial red carpet attire designed for the gossip mill, but even the provocateur pop queen’s meat gown at the recent MTV Awards couldn’t compete with the Black Eyed Peas' Will.i.am’s wardrobe decision. For a futuristic performance at the pre-show, Will.i.am opted to take Jay-Z’s ‘All black everything’ mantra literally, donning head-to-toe leather and painting his face black, thereby performing a kind of inverse, 21st-Century minstrelsy, and r
Source: National Review
Oct 19, 2010
[Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.]
Who says Islam is a totalitarian doctrine? Well, Geert Wilders does, of course. As the editors point out in Monday’s superb National Review Online editorial, the Dutch parliamentarian has even had the temerity to compare Islam with Nazism. Strong stuff indeed, and for speaking it, Wilders has earned the disdain not just of the us
Source: Louisville Courier-Journal
Oct 18, 2010
The guest speakers and attendees of the upcoming Filson Institute Academic Conference had better be on their best historically accurate behavior, because James Loewen will be in the house....
He recently responded to e-mailed questions.
It's been 15 years since “Lies My Teacher Told Me” was published. You concluded that there wasn't one textbook that did a decent job of making history interesting or memorable. Have things changed since then?
Source: NYT
Oct 18, 2010
WASHINGTON — A rift has emerged within the Democratic Party between liberal economists, who generally view the 2009 stimulus package as a success and say that Keynesian economics should remain the heart of the party’s economic policy, and elected officials, who in growing numbers have shunned affiliation with the $787 billion effort and are expressing doubts about the effectiveness of fiscal intervention....
Ambivalence about using government borrowing and spending to spur the econo
Source: NYT
Oct 18, 2010
E.J. Dionne Jr....[O]n the far right, Glenn Beck and his allies cast President Obama as the central figure in a conspiracy against America itself, fueling participation by the most extreme 10 percent or 15 percent of the electorate. Their crackpot ideas, as the historian Sean Wil
Source: Chris Hedges at Truthdig
Oct 18, 2010
Staughton Lynd could have built an enviable career as an academic but for his conscience. His conscience led him as a young undergraduate disgusted by the elitism around him to drop out of Harvard, and tortured him when he returned to finish his degree. It plagued him after he received his doctorate from Columbia and saw him head to the segregated South to join his friend Howard Zinn in teaching history at the historically black Spelman College. It propelled him to become the director of Freedom
Source: NY Post
Oct 17, 2010
A Brooklyn College history professor who panned members of an influential faculty committee as "lily white" has resigned after being elected to the panel, The Post has learned.
Associate professor Jocelyn Wills sent an e-mail to colleagues voting for members of four faculty-search committees to recruit new deans to the college. She criticized the administrative appointees on the panel as racially wrong.
"Please spread the word among your colleagues and fr
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 14, 2010
History in schools is being put under threat as thousands of children are allowed to drop the subject at the age of 14 for “trivial reasons”, according to a leading academic.
Dr Sean Lang, senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, criticised the “absolutely ludicrous” system in Britain that requires pupils to choose subject options half-way through secondary education.
He said many children were pushed into abandoning vital components of the curriculum fo
Source: Jerusalem Post
Oct 14, 2010
The Jerusalem Report: How did the events of October 2000 impact on Israeli society?Prof. Elie Rekhess: We must evaluate these events and their aftermath on three levels: Arab society, Jewish society and the government.
In terms of Arab society: Although the tensions had been building and the riots should not have come as a surprise to anyone, the events of October 2000 were the “Big Bang” for the Arab community in Israel. The riots and t
Source: Medievalists.net
Oct 13, 2010
A historian who changed the face of modern Welsh history is to be commemorated with a biennial Public Lecture in his name at Bangor University. The inaugural J. E. Lloyd Lecture will discuss J.E. Lloyd’s own reinterpretation of Welsh history. The Lecture takes place at 6.15 on Friday 22 October at Bangor University’s Main Arts Lecture Theatre and is open to all.
John Edward Lloyd (1861–1947) played a major part in the early history of the University College of North Wales, Bangor, b
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 12, 2010
[Mark Leccese, a journalism professor at Emerson College.]
Two weeks ago, a handful of bloggers wrote scathingly about Ken Burns’ use of former Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin — two prominent writers who have faced credible plagiarism and fabrication charges that you can read about here, here and here — as prominent interview subjects in Burns’ most recent documentary about baseball, “The Tenth Inning.”...
What amazes and troubles
Source: St. Louis Beacon
Oct 11, 2010
...Forty years ago, Asif came to St. Louis. Then, there was one Nation of Islam mosque, traditionally attended by black American Muslims, in the city. Now, the St. Louis area has at least nine Muslim community centers, which include masjids, also called mosques, for worship, classroom space for instruction and meeting space for social gatherings. Those centers are in Manchester, Overland, Glen Carbon, Ill., and Belleville, Ill., among others. Hasic says people tend to attend the mosques closest
Source: Tulsa World
Oct 11, 2010
CLAREMORE - The class had already reached the Punic Wars by late September, but the students in Rogers State University's introduction to military history course have a lot of ground left to cover if they are going to get to the Vietnam War by the end of the semester.
It's only the second time the course has been offered at RSU, and yet it has 20 students.
"That's a large enrollment for a class that's only been offered once," said Paul Hatley, the associ
Source: IUPUI News Center
Oct 11, 2010
Despite this country’s tradition of separating church and state, Americans have historically believed that our country was created for a divine purpose.
“The debate has been over just what that divine purpose has been – and that’s where politics has played a role,” says Philip Goff, executive director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, part of the School of Liberal Arts at IUPUI.
Goff is one of several religious historians interviewed for “God
Source: NYT
Oct 11, 2010
The revelation that Rich Iott, a Republican candidate for Congress from Ohio, was an active member of a group of dedicated to understanding the experience of soldiers who served in the Nazi Waffen SS by dressing up in their uniforms — and staging recreations of their battles — has forced historical re-enactors to defend their hobby....Changes have been made to the Web site of the group Mr. Iott used to be a member of, Wiking.org — and an affiliated YouTube channel — but The Atlantic
Source: NYT
Oct 11, 2010
The regular NYT feature "Room for Debate" hosted a roundtable of historians on October 13 to discuss why Woodrow Wilson sparks such animosity within conservative circles today.Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard University:This professor-president [Woodrow Wilson] has convenient similarities to our
