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: Steven J. Zipperstein at the CHE
Sep 5, 2010
[Steven J. Zipperstein is a professor of Jewish culture and history at Stanford University. He is the author, most recently, of Rosenfeld's Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing (Yale University Press, 2009).]
Tony Judt, who died last month at the age of 62 after suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, was an unlikely celebrity academic. He was soft-spoken, dressed much like a graduate student, rarely appeared on television or radio, and derided postmodernism and ethnic stud
Source: CHE
Sep 5, 2010
In Greenwich Village, not far from where Bob Dylan got his start—but in a chic Italian bistro, not a smoky dive like the late, lamented Gaslight Cafe—the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz is choking up, recalling when Dylan's new recordings began to mean something to him again, after he'd drifted away from Dylan in the 1980s.
It was 1994, and Wilentz's father, Eli, who had run or co-run the Village's Eighth Street Bookshop, a center of New York literary life from the 1940s until it c
Source: Irish Times
Sep 4, 2010
ALF O'BRIEN: ALF O’BRIEN, who has died aged 72, was a lecturer in the department of medieval history in University College Cork, a dedicated socialist and a leading authority on the life and times of medieval Ireland.
He had a particular interest in the growth of commercial relations between Ireland and the rest of Europe between the 11th and mid-16th centuries, a period when the “merchant prince” families of busy ports like Cork, Galway, Waterford, Dublin and other maritime cities
Source: NYT
Sep 1, 2010
Reading about it online, you would think that the controversy over this year’s assigned reading for students new to Brooklyn College would have led to fevered student and faculty protests by now, making the campus the latest to be roiled by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But so far at least, the furor over the book — “How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America,” by Moustafa Bayoumi, an associate English professor at Brooklyn College – is unfolding a bit lik
Source: The Atlantic
Aug 31, 2010
Back in 1958, the Atlantic published "The Lesson of Iraq," by a young Harvard professor named William R. Polk. The breaking Iraqi news that then required explanation was the military coup that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy and created the Republic, which Saddam Hussein would later control.
Writing at a time when most of the world was unrecognizably different from now -- tens of millions of Chinese were starving to death during the famines of Mao's Great Leap Forward, t
Source: JHU Gazette
Aug 30, 2010
Anthony John R. Russell-Wood, the Herbert Baxter Adams Professor of History at The Johns Hopkins University and a widely published expert in the history and culture of pre-Columbian and colonial Latin America, died Aug. 13 at his Lutherville home after a brief illness.
A faculty member at Johns Hopkins since 1971, Russell-Wood, 70, was a prolific author and one of the world’s foremost historians of Brazil and the Portuguese seaborne empire.His voracious appetite
Source: Deutsche Welle
Aug 28, 2010
A plan existed to bring the 1968 Olympic Games to Berlin, which was divided by then East and West Germany, a sports historian said Saturday. But the Allies, along with the West German government, would not allow it.
Christopher Young, who also heads German studies at the University of Cambridge, told the online edition of daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel that the idea was the brainchild of eventual Chancellor Willy Brandt.
"It was somewhat of a crazy idea of (the t
Source: NYT
Aug 27, 2010
David J. Weber, whose groundbreaking works on the American Southwest under Spain and Mexico opened new territory for historians, died on Aug. 20 in Gallup, N.M. He was 69 and lived in Dallas and Ramah, N.M.
The cause was complications from multiple myeloma, said his wife, Carol.
When Mr. Weber began writing about the history of the borderlands between present-day Mexico and the United States, the subject was regarded as a backwater.
“United States historian
Source: CNN.com
Aug 26, 2010
Pressure continues to mount on President Obama to select Elizabeth Warren as the nation's first consumer financial protection regulator.
Warren, 61, has become something of a cause célèbre as the administration's top pick to run the new agency charged with protecting consumers from abusive mortgage and credit card practices....
"The administration is hesitating because they're faced with the traditional problem that Obama has faced," said Julian Zelizer, a pro
Source: NYT
Aug 26, 2010
Franz Schurmann, an expert on China during the cold war and a globe-trotting professor who helped found the Pacific News Service, a provider of news and commentary about Asia, died on Aug. 20 at his home in San Francisco. He was 84. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, his wife, Sandy Close, said.
Mr. Schurmann, who was fluent in as many as 12 languages and read a variety of foreign papers daily, taught history and sociology at the University of Calif
Source: John B. Judis in The New Republic
Aug 25, 2010
[John B. Judis is a senior editor of The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.]In the week since my story on “the unnecessary fall of Barack Obama” came out, I have been accused of being “hysterical” and
Source: Center for Labor Renewal
Aug 25, 2010
Suddenly Staughton Lynd is all the rage. Again. In the last 18 months, Lynd has published two new books, a third that's a reprint of an earlier work, plus a memoir co-authored with his wife Alice. In addition, a portrait of his life as an activist through 1970 by Carl Mirra of Adelphi University has been published, with another book about his work after 1970 by Mark Weber of Kent State University due soon.
In an epoch of imperial hubris and corporate class wa
Source: BBC News
Aug 24, 2010
A Bath historian is hoping to give an admiral's wife - who tended to a wounded Lord Nelson - "her rightful place in history".
Dr Elaine Chalus has won a major research grant of more than £100,000 to investigate diaries kept by Elizabeth Wynne....
Dr Chalus will use her funding from the British Academy to bring to light more than 40 volumes of Elizabeth's diaries, most of which have never been published....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 24, 2010
Bryan McNerney, who presented several successful history series on ITV, has been accused of blocking a footpath through the grounds of his country home.
But the 57-year-old insists that a mistake by a map maker half a century ago wrongly showed the right of way through the property - ironically called "Garden of Eden".
Mr McNerney and his wife Cate, a nurse, bought the property set in wooded grounds in the village of Banham, near Attlebrough, Norfolk, three y
Source: SF Chronicle
Aug 23, 2010
Franz Schurmann, a sociologist and historian who was an influential scholar of modern China and a co-founder of Pacific News Service in 1970, died Friday at his San Francisco home of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, his family said. He was 84.
Mr. Schurmann taught at UC Berkeley for 38 years and headed its Center for Chinese Studies. He spoke a dozen languages and wrote more than a half dozen books on China and U.S. foreign policy. His writings early in the Cold War accurately
Source: NYT
Aug 23, 2010
For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of
Source: Debbie Ann Doyle at the AHA Blog
Aug 23, 2010
[Debbie Ann Doyle works with the Professional Division and staffs the Task Force on Disability and the LGBTQ Historians Task Force.]
David J. Weber, historian of the Borderlands, the American West, and Latin America and vice-president of the American Historical Association’s Professional Division, died on Friday, August 20, after a long struggle with multiple myeloma.
Weber was Robert and Nancy Dedman professor of history and founding director of the William P. Clements
Source: FrontPageMag
Aug 23, 2010
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern.
FP: Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
I would like to talk to you today about the proposed mega-mosque next to Ground Zero and how Obama is handling it.
First, what do you make of the controversy surrounding the mosq
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2010
In baseball terms you might describe it as a walk-off hit deep into extra innings. Dorothy Jane Mills, below, the widow of the revered baseball historian Harold Seymour, has been belatedly recognized by Oxford University Press as co-author, along with Mr. Seymour, of three landmark scholarly works on the history of baseball, Publishers Weekly reported. Tim Bent, Oxford’s executive editor, said that Ms. Mills, 81, formerly Dorothy Z. Seymour, would be given formal credit and that her name would n
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2010
David A. Moss, an economic and policy historian at the Harvard Business School, has spent years studying income inequality. While he has long believed that the growing disparity between the rich and poor was harmful to the people on the bottom, he says he hadn’t seen the risks to the world of finance, where many of the richest earn their great fortunes. Now, as he studies the financial crisis of 2008, Mr. Moss says that even Wall Street may have something serious to fear from inequality — namely, another crisis. The possible connection between economic inequality and financial crises came to Mr. Moss about a year ago, when he was at his research center in Cambridge, Mass. A colleague suggested that he overlay two different graphs — one plotting financial regulation and bank failures, and the other charting trends in income inequality. Mr. Moss says he was surprised by what he saw. The timelines danced in sync with each other. Income disparities between rich and poor widened as government regulations eased and bank failures rose. “I could hardly believe how tight the fit was — it was a stunning correlation,” he said. “And it began to raise the question of whether there are causal links between financial deregulation, economic inequality and instability in the financial sector. Are all of these things connected?”
