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: Cutting Edge News
Apr 26, 2010
[Cutting Edge senior correspondent Martin Barillas edits Speroforum.com.]Wikipedia posters continued to struggle with the campaign to delete information about IBM’s involvement in the Holocaust as contributors posted and reposted conflicting theories of what should and should not be allowed to appear in the Internet encyclopedia. Wikipedia is the massive online project anyone can edit at any time, generally using fictitious names. Key among the issues in contention was whet
Source: The New Yorker
Apr 26, 2010
[Richard Rayner writes for The New Yorker.]
Nonfiction writers who succumb to the temptations of phantom scholarship are a burgeoning breed these days, although most stop short of fabricating interviews with Presidents. But Stephen Ambrose, who, at the time of his death, in 2002, was America’s most famous and popular historian, appears to have done just that. Before publishing a string of No. 1 best-sellers, including “Band of Brothers” and “D-Day,” Ambrose had made his name chronicling the l
Source: Independent (UK)
Apr 25, 2010
...The professor of Russian history at Birkbeck, University of London, who has previously been engaged in at least two legal disputes with other historians, has been accused and cleared of plagiarism, and received hate mail while an academic at Cambridge. One colleague who did not want to be named described the most recent episode as "the tip of the iceberg"....
In 1997, the American historian Richard Pipes claimed that Figes had "quoted copiously but not always gener
Source: Times Online (UK)
Apr 25, 2010
[Oliver Kamm is a leader writer and columnist at The Times. He was previously an investment banker and co-founder of an asset management firm.]This is, to coin a phrase,
Source: NJ.com
Apr 24, 2010
A literary mystery that has lingered since the Civil War has apparently been solved by a pair of professors from The College of New Jersey.
Their findings ended up as a new book, "A Secession Crisis Enigma," by Daniel Crofts, a professor of history who turned to David Holmes, professor of statistics, while looking for an answer to a longstanding question.
They wanted to determine who was the author of "The Diary of a Public Man," which was published
Source: The Daily Mail (UK)
Apr 23, 2010
For a week now, an extraordinary row has had Britain’s academe in turmoil with threats of libel writs and the bloodying of distinguished reputations.
But now, in an astonishing twist to the saga, I can reveal that the offending reviews on Amazon were not, after all, written by Figes’s wife, Stephanie, herself a Cambridge University law lecturer....
In a startling admission, which will put to rest the minds of those attacked — who all feared libel writs were on their way
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 23, 2010
The April 26 issue of The New Yorker seems to have added one more nail to the reputation of the late Stephen E. Ambrose, university historian turned hugely popular -—and prolific—author of nonfiction historical narrative. Originally known for his scholarly biographies on Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon, Ambrose broke into the popular market with Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest, which was turned into a well-known, and mu
Source: Guardian (UK)
Apr 23, 2010
After threatening colleagues, literary journals and newspapers with legal action last week, Orlando Figes has revealed this morning that it was not his wife who anonymously rubbished fellow historians in comments on Amazon: it was him.
In a statement released to the Daily Mail the professor of history at London's Birkbeck College said that he takes "full responsibility" for what he called "foolish errors".
The story began when historians began to not
Source: Robert Townsend in Perspectives
Apr 22, 2010
[Robert Townsend is the AHA’s assistant director for research and publications.]
Historians in academia saw little, if any improvement in their wages over the past academic year, as average salaries for regular full-time faculty at most ranks grew by less than 1 percent according to a new study from the College and University Personnel Association for Human Resources (CUPA–HR). This represents the smallest average increase in salaries for historians in 15 years.
To make
Source: CBC News
Apr 22, 2010
It was part protest, part celebration, and an estimated 20 million Americans took part.
On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, millions of people across the U.S. went to large public rallies, listened to political speeches, took part in teach-ins, went to concerts and educational fairs, and helped to clean up their communities. Air and water pollution, nuclear testing and loss of wilderness were major concerns.
Some university students in New York City donned gas masks
Source: Forbes
Apr 21, 2010
In China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, just published by Oxford University Press, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom provides answers to a wide range of commonly asked questions about the world's most populous country. The excerpt below describes two of the topics the book addresses: nationalism and the web.What is the role of the Internet in politic
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 21, 2010
"Your only hope for rescue is the destruction of the Jews before they destroy you!" Hitler said in a 1942 message, one of thousands broadcast across the Middle East in an attempt to woo the Arab world.
In a broadcast aimed at provoking an anti-Semitic uprising in Egypt, he said: "A large number of Jews who live in Egypt, along with Poles, Greeks, Armenians and Frenchmen, have guns and ammunition.
"Some Jews in Cairo have even asked the British author
Source: Independent (UK)
Apr 20, 2010
The use of libel law by academics to threaten the press has been condemned by a leading literary figure. Sir Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, spoke out against Orlando Figes, the historian and author, after Figes's wife confessed to writing several reviews for Amazon.com, praising her husband's work and trashing that of his rivals. After Figes's legal advisers had accused the TLS of defamation for first raising the issue, Stothard said: "When academics start using th
Source: The Nation
Apr 20, 2010
[Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. He's also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host.]
Stephen Ambrose, the best-selling historian who wrote or edited more than a dozen books about Eisenhower as general and president, based his fame in large part on what he said were his interviews with Ike – but now, eight years after Ambrose's death, an official at the Eisenhower Library in Abeline says the interviews never took p
Source: NYT
Apr 20, 2010
Thaksin Shinawatra is angry. “This is the worst political accusation I ever had,” Mr. Thaksin, a former prime minister, said Tuesday in a message delivered by a spokesman — sent, as always, from an undisclosed location abroad.
Behind the coils of barbed wire and battle-ready troops in the city’s financial district, someone has been poking fun at him, putting up signs that say, “Thaksin Shinawatra, president of a New Thai State.” It is a sensitive point for Mr. Thaksin and his red sh
Source: Crikey (AU)
Apr 19, 2010
A furore has erupted over Australia’s Anzac Day legacy, with the authors of a new book which questions the day’s origins accused by a rival historian of failing to acknowledge the preeminent scholar in the field.
As Australians prepare to pay tribute to the country’s fallen soldiers, La Trobe University Emeritus Scholar Inga Clendinnen has declared war on a controversial new book What’s Wrong With Anzac? The militarisation of Australian history.
Clendinnen told Crikey t
Source: Tenured Radical (Blog)
Apr 19, 2010
It is with great sadness that I report the death of Sharon Sievers on April 5, 2010 after a long illness in Long Beach, California. Sharon was the chair of the History Department (for over twelve years!) and sometime director of Women's Studies for forty years at California State University Long Beach. In the early 1980s, together with the ACLU she helped save the newly-nascent Women's Studies program by suing the university which was bowing to public pressure from neo-conservatives in the area.
Source: The Nation
Apr 19, 2010
[Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. He's also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host.]
A prominent British historian has found a new way to get in trouble: Orlando Figes, a historian of Stalin's Russia at Birkbeck College, London, and a contributor to the New York Review, has admitted that his wife has been publishing hostile comments about rival historians at Amazon.co.uk under a pseudonym.
The practic
Source: AAAS Press Release
Apr 19, 2010
CAMBRIDGE, MA – The following historians are among the two hundred and twenty-nine leaders in the sciences, the humanities and the arts, business, public affairs, and the nonprofit sector who have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.· &nb
Source: Cutting Edge News
Apr 19, 2010
[Martin Barillas is senior correspondent for the Cutting Edge News.]Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia
created by anonymous editors, has reacted to disclosures in The Cutting Edge News that three of its editors were jointly seeking to water down or delete the history of IBM's involvement in the Holocaust. One editor has been banned and a second has been openly challenged for being “annoying” and revising an entry on IBM despite the open appear
