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: East London Advertiser
Oct 10, 2010
A LEADING authority on contemporary British history who has taught generations of students at Queen Mary’s Mile End campus has been elevated to the House of Lords.
Peter Hennessy is Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary where he helped set up the influential Mile End Group which hosts public lectures on contemporary British history, focusing on Whitehall and politics.He is also a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written a number of books including Never
Source: Southwest Riverside News Network
Oct 9, 2010
A retired UC Riverside professor is set to be honored by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II.
Henry Snyder, UC Riverside professor of history emeritus, will be presented with the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire medal Oct. 16 in Los Angeles, for his 32 years of work on the English Short-Title Catalogue.
The award was announced by the queen in December, and is rarely presented to individuals outside of the United Kingdom, said UCR Spokeswoman Bettye Miller in a news r
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 8, 2010
A historian has launched a one-man campaign to protect 1930s fascist graffiti, claiming it is of historical significance.
The black-painted slogan, now barely visible, reads "STAND BY THE KING", with the crooked-flash logo of the British Union of Fascists encircled below.
The work is thought to date from the abdication crisis when Edward VIII had to choose between keeping his throne or marrying American divorcee Wallis Simpson in 1936....
Alan Qu
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 8, 2010
The appointment of historian and presenter Simon Schama as the Coalition Government's new history tsar has been condemned as insincere and insulting by a leading academic.
Prof Mary Beard, classics professor at Cambridge University, described the announcement as an example of Michael Gove, the education secretary, "playing to the populist gallery".
She described the idea that a celebrity could be "parachuted" in to solve problems as insulting to Brit
Source: National Post
Oct 8, 2010
The finalists for McGill University’s Cundill Prize in History, the largest award for historical non-fiction in the world, were announced on Thursday.
The nominees are:
• Giancarlo Casale for The Ottoman Age of Exploration, published by Oxford University Press. Casale is an assistant professor of the history of the Islamic world and the 2009-2011 McKnight Land Grant Professor at the University of Minnesota.
• Diarmaid Macculloch for A History of Christiani
Source: CHE
Oct 7, 2010
What did Richard M. Nixon tell members of a federal grand jury when he testified before them in June 1975? Hoping to find out, a leading Watergate historian and four historical associations have filed a petition in federal court to make that testimony public. Grand-jury testimony almost always remains sealed. In this instance, the petitioners said, the historical interest justifies opening it.
"There's important historical information in this testimony, and there's really no re
Source: William & Mary News
Oct 7, 2010
Rhys Isaac, former Distinguished Visiting Professor of Early American History at the College, has died of cancer. He was 72.
Isaac, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for his book “The Transformation of Virginia, 1740 -1790,” enjoyed an exemplary career in teaching and research, most especially in his scholarship on Colonial North America. He remains the only Australian historian ever to win a Pulitzer.
Isaac served several stints at William & Mary. He came in August
Source: AP
Oct 6, 2010
WASHINGTON – The laws signed by Adolf Hitler taking away the citizenship of German Jews before the Holocaust were placed on rare public display Wednesday at the National Archives.
The Nuremberg Laws were turned over to the archives in August by The Huntington, a museum complex near Los Angeles where they were quietly deposited by Gen. George Patton at the end of World War II. The papers will be on display in a separate gallery from the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independen
Source: HNN Staff
Oct 6, 2010
A group of distinguished historians, educators, and filmmakers has published an open letter to the Department of the Interior to protest the National Park Service’s decision to remove the Blair Mountain battlefield in Logan County, West Virginia, from the National Register of Historic Places.The Battle of Blair Mountain was the largest armed conflict on American soil since the Civil War. Fighting broke out between 10,000 unionized coal miners, enraged by years of brutal treatme
Source: UPenn Almanac
Oct 5, 2010
Moshe “Misha” Lewin, professor emeritus of history, died August 14, in Paris, France. He was 88 years old.
Dr. Lewin was born in Wilno, Poland in 1921 to ethnic Jewish parents who died in the Holocaust. He moved to the Soviet Union in 1941 ahead of the invading Nazis and enlisted in the Soviet army in 1943. He received his BA from Tel Aviv University, Israel in 1961. That same year he received a research scholarship to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he earned a PhD in 1964. H
Source: HNN Staff
Oct 3, 2010
Many media outlets have noted that John C. Cutler, the late doctor who led the U.S. Public Health Service syphilis experiment on Guatemalan inmates and later participated in the Tuskegee experiment, defended the latter well into the 1990s, most famously for a 1993 PBS Nova documentary entitled
Source: NYT
Oct 2, 2010
NEW DELHI — When India won its bid for the 2010 Commonwealth Games seven years ago, the event instantly became an emblem of national prestige. But as the country prepares to open the games on Sunday evening, an opportunity to burnish its global image has instead become a national embarrassment.
The litany of problems plaguing the games — collapsed footbridges, filthy dorms, cartoonish corruption — have not only made headlines around the world. They have left Indians to wonder why a
Source: Examiner.com
Oct 2, 2010
Of course everyone has heard by now the appalling discovery unearthed by Wellesley College professor, Susan Reverby on how the US Public Health Service (a medical branch of the US government) conducted clearly unethical and dangerous syphilis experiments in Guatemala in the mid-40s....
Cutler, the government physician, would also take part in the equally abhorrent US government sponsored Tuskegee Syphilis Study.
Do you think Cutler was just a rogue doctor performing dan
Source: News Blaze
Oct 2, 2010
WELLESLEY, Mass. - Digging in the archives at the University of Pittsburgh, Wellesley College medical historian Susan M. Reverby knew what she found was important enough to keep it *out* of the book she was writing on the history and myths surrounding the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study. She did not expect what she finally wrote up to make it to the White House, through the State Department and to Guatemala.
Reverby's book, "Examining Tuskegee," published in November 2009
Source: NYT
Oct 1, 2010
From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin.
American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis-infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some pri
Source: Fox News
Oct 1, 2010
The U.S. government apologized Friday for "unethical" and "reprehensible" research conducted in Guatemala more than 60 years ago, after a professor documented how U.S. scientists intentionally infected people in the country with sexually transmitted diseases.
Susan Reverby, a women's studies professor at Wellesley College, published a paper detailing the joint research program between the U.S. and Guatemalan governments. From 1946-1948, doctors enabled men in pr
Source: NYT
Oct 1, 2010
The son of a prominent professor at the University of Chicago was convicted on Thursday of impersonating a New York University professor and other scholars who disagreed with his father’s theories on the origin of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Jurors took half a day to find the son, Raphael Haim Golb, a 50-year-old real estate lawyer, guilty on 30 of 31 counts, including identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment....
Prosecutors contended that Mr. Golb had
Source: Deutsche Welle
Sep 30, 2010
Philip D. Zelikow worked on German reunification as a senior National Security Council official under President George H.W. Bush. Together with Condoleezza Rice, he is the author of"Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (1995)." Zelikow also served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission and as the top adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. He is currently the White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the Uni
Source: Psychology Today
Sep 29, 2010
Don't knock masturbation," Woody Allen famously quipped. "It's sex with someone I love." But masturbation has of course been knocked around some, historically. According to Thomas W. Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley (and the author of "Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation") masturbation was not a topic of great interest to the powers that be until 1712, when a con man named John Marten anonymously published a book sp
Source: Truthdig
Sep 28, 2010
[Visit William Pfaff’s Web site for more on his latest book, “The Irony of Manifest Destiny: The Tragedy of America’s Foreign Policy” (Walker & Co., $25), at www.williampfaff.com.]
A splendid and courageous new book, “Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War,” by Andrew J. Bacevich of Boston University (and for many years previously, the U.S. Army), describes with lucidity the degree to which the power of the American presidency
