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: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 18, 2010
Orlando Figes, professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, and author of a book on Stalin, has named his wife as the author of comments criticising books written by other renowned scholars as being "dark and pretentious" and "critically dull".
Mr Figes had initially denied any knowledge of the reviewer who used the pseudonym "Historian" and wrote glowing comments about his own books.
But following an angry exchange of emails and lawye
Source: Guardian (UK)
Apr 18, 2010
MI5 secretly planted bugs in 10 Downing Street despite repeated official denials and they remained in place for more than 10 years during the tenure of five prime ministers.
The disclosure was to have been included in the official history of MI5 by the Cambridge historian, Christopher Andrew, published last year to mark the agency's 100th anniversary. It is believed to have been suppressed by senior Whitehall officials to protect the "public interest".
Bugs ar
Source: Guardian (UK)
Apr 18, 2010
An extraordinary literary "whodunnit" over the identity of a mystery reviewer who savaged works by some of Britain's leading academics on the Amazon website has culminated in a top historian admitting that the culprit was, in fact, his wife.
Prof Orlando Figes, 50, an expert on Russia and professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, made the startling revelation in a statement through lawyers following a week of intrigue, suspicion, legal threats and angry email excha
Source: Foreign Policy Journal
Apr 16, 2010
Dr George Barnsby, who died on April 11 at the age of 91 in Wolverhampton, was a leading radical activist and historian of the working class movement in the Black Country. Born in London in a working class family, his father died he was only three years old. Now his mother had the sole responsibility to take care of her two infant sons in dire circumstances. The vicissitudes of his early life made George aware that the station in life of many people was determined by their social and economic st
Source: Medieval News
Apr 16, 2010
Professor Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh has been named as the first ever established Chair of Gaelic in Scotland by the University of Glasgow. The Chair has been created to recognise the University as a centre of excellence for the study of Celtic and Gaelic.
Professor Ó Maolalaigh, who is also head of Celtic and Gaelic, said: “It is a huge honour to be named as the first ever established Chair of Gaelic in Scotland by the University of Glasgow. This underlines the university’s commitment t
Source: NYT
Apr 16, 2010
It makes sense that people would take to the streets to protest government spending and enormous deficits during the Great Recession, when they are feeling economic pain most acutely.
What accounts for this gap between how they are faring and how they feel the country is faring? History offers some lessons. The poll reveals a deep conviction among Tea Party supporters that the country is being run by people who do not share their values, for the benefit of people who are not like th
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 16, 2010
According to my research, every 11-year-old has read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson. What I didn't know when I was 11—and, in fact, didn't know until a couple of weeks ago—is that Kidnapped was based on a true story. In 1728, a boy named James Annesley, the son of a baron, was kidnapped, forced into indentured servitude, escaped, and tried to prove his aristocratic lineage in the days before fingerprints, photographs, and DNA.
That true story is told in a new book, Birthright:
Source: Baltimore Sun
Apr 15, 2010
"I was amazed that people didn't take to the streets after the health care reform bill passed," said a politician of my acquaintance the other day. That got me to wondering about what has happened to the power of "the street" in affecting what governments do. It seems to have seeped away, stealthily, over the years. People can gather in great numbers in Washington, London and other capital cities, wave their signs, shout their slogans, voice their displeasure with war, aborti
Source: Tenured Radical
Apr 15, 2010
Andrew Apter, Professor of History and Anthropology, and Director, James S. Coleman African Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles: A study of slave coasts and hinterlands in Afro-American perspective.
Joshua Brown, Executive Director, American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning, The Graduate Center, CUNY: The visual culture of the American Civil War.
Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnation
Source: Keith Erekson
Apr 14, 2010
Historians from the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Texas at El Paso have written an Open Letter to the Texas State Board of Education. The letter identifies specific problems with the proposed changes to the state’s social studies standards and recommends that the board delay adoption of the standards in order to solicit additional feedback from “qualified, credentialed content experts from the state’s colleges and universities” and the
Source: Time Out Chicago
Apr 14, 2010
As an LGBT historian and an out man since the Stonewall era, John D’Emilio thought he’d seen it all—until he moved here in 1999. “The rainbow pylons on Halsted had just gone up the year before,” he says. “I am driving around and when I see these things I just began to laugh. I thought, Oh, my God, a city has actually put up markers saying this is a gay-friendly neighborhood. Who ever heard of such a thing?” For D’Emilio, 61, a professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Apr 14, 2010
Gary Cross is a professor of history at Penn State University whose most recent book, "Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity," addresses just that.
"This trend has been building up over the last 50 years to where today it really is hard to see [role] models, to recognize these models of maturity," he said. "Men have, in effect, slowly and not always steadily rebelled against the role of being providers and being sacrificers."
The old
Source: NYT
Apr 13, 2010
Nearly seven hours of unreleased interviews with Jacqueline Kennedy, recorded just months after the death of President John F. Kennedy and intended for deposit in a future presidential library, will be released as a book, the publisher Hyperion said on Tuesday. The original interviews with Mrs. Kennedy took place in the spring of 1964 with the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. as part of an oral history project intended to preserve memories of Kennedy and his administration. In the seven inter
Source: AP
Apr 12, 2010
HISTORY: "Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World" by Liaquat Ahamed
A Harvard graduate [who] was born in Kenya, Ahamed dreamed of being a writer while he worked as an investment manager.
"Lords of Finance" is a compelling account of how the actions of four bankers triggered the Depression and ultimately turned the United States into the world's financial leader, the Pulitzer board said.
"Mr. Ahamed does a superlative job
Source: LA Times
Apr 12, 2010
[Gregory Rodriguez is a columnist for the LA Times.]
A few months ago, Ohio State University historian Randolph Roth published a groundbreaking book, "American Homicide," that offers something like a unified theory of why Americans kill each other at such a high rate and what can be done about it.
After meticulously tracing trends in violence and political power in the U.S. from colonial times to the present, Roth concludes that high homicide rates "are n
Source: The American Prospect
Apr 9, 2010
Natalie Zemon Daviswill be awarded the 2010 Holberg International Memorial Prize on June 9 for the way in which her work "shows how particular events can be narrated and analyzed so as to reveal deeper historical tendencies and underlying patterns of thought and action."
Davis describes her work as anthropological in nature. Rather than tell the political s
Source: Newsweek
Apr 9, 2010
Stewart Rhodes does not seem like an extremist. He is a graduate of Yale Law School and a former U.S. Army paratrooper and congressional staffer. He is not at all secretive. In February he was sitting at a table at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at a fancy downtown hotel in Washington, handing out fliers and selling T shirts for his organization, the Oath Keepers. Rhodes says he has 6,000 dues-paying members, active and retired police and military, who promise never t
Source: WaPo
Apr 7, 2010
...The older things get, the more they're secret? The Pentagon has been holding back some documents, requested by the independent researchers at the National Security Archive 18 years ago, about a project that has come to be known as "Poodle Blanket." This is about contingency plans in 1961 for a possible confrontation over West Berlin. That would be "a city that is no longer divided, a confrontation with a country that no longer exists and a war that ended 20 years ago," sai
Source: Press Release
Apr 6, 2010
Ernest Freeberg will receive the 2010 Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award, presented by the Intellectual Freedom Round Table (IFRT) of the American Library Association (ALA). Freeberg was selected for his book,“Democracy's Prisoner: Eugene V. Debs, the Great War, and the Right to Dissent” (Harvard University Press, 2008).
The award is named for the late Idaho University librarian Eli M. Oboler—famed as a “champion of intellectual freedom who demanded the dismantling of all barrier
Source: Robert Townsend at AHA Blog
Apr 6, 2010
The AHA’s History Doctoral Programs web site has now been updated to include current information on students, faculty, and departments as a whole. In addition to department-level fixes, the site has also been updated to include links to a wealth of additional information about universities in the United States.
Since the site was first brought online five years ago, staff have only been able to regularly change some of the information—such as the general program descriptions and inf
