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: Press Release from the National Council on Public History
Mar 3, 2010
History at work in the world. Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the National Council on Public History will be meeting in Portland next week. Adam Hochschild, nominated for the National Book Award, will be the conference’s keynote speaker in a free, public event, “Adventures in Public History,” at the Hilton Portland, Friday, March 12, at 8:00 p.m. Public history is a booming profession in which historical research and interpretation are made with and useful to the public, typically outside of
Source: AOL News
Mar 3, 2010
eviving a controversy about which American historical figures deserve to be honored on the nation's currency, a North Carolina congressman is proposing replacing a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant on the $50 bill with one of conservative icon Ronald Reagan.
"President Reagan is indisputably one of the most transformative presidents of the 20th century," Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Republican, said in a letter to his fellow members of Congress. "Like President Roosevelt on the
Source: NYT
Mar 3, 2010
Diane Ravitch, the education historian who built her intellectual reputation battling progressive educators and served in the first Bush administration’s Education Department, is in the final stages of an astonishing, slow-motion about-face on almost every stand she once took on American schooling.
Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis
Source: Washington Times
Mar 3, 2010
The leader of a global Muslim movement Tuesday issued a rare religious edict condemning terrorism and denouncing suicide bombers as "heroes of hellfire" in an effort to help prevent the radicalization of young British Muslims....
Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former Pakistani lawmaker and a leading scholar of Islam, has issued similar, shorter decrees in the past. But the new fatwa makes the most detailed and comprehensive case against Islamic extremism by a Muslim, diplomats
Source: Canada.com
Mar 3, 2010
Turning hockey into a history lesson is a dream come true for Tim Lewis.
Lewis combined his love of hockey and passion for history and developed two hockey-themed history courses in the summer including Hockey and the Canadian Identity to 1952: The Development of a National Obsession, and Hockey and the Canadian Identity since 1952: Canada's Game in the Cold War and Beyond.
The courses aren't based on the pure history of hockey, but rather he uses hockey as a prism thro
Source: CBC News
Mar 2, 2010
Investigations into cases of students who died or went missing while attending Canada's residential schools are a priority for the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission, says the group's new research director.
Trent University history professor John Milloy was appointed last month as director of research for the federal commission, which is charged with creating a historical account of the residential school system, helping people heal and encouraging reconc
Source: The Virginian-Pilot
Mar 2, 2010
Civil War history is rich with tales of blood and gore, heroism, and too many lies.
Some of the nation's pre-eminent historians will examine that history in a symposium, "Race, Slavery and the Civil War: The Tough Stuff of American History and Memory," at Norfolk State University in September.
The conference is free and open to the public, and registration opened this week.
James Horton, professor, author, and consultant to film and television, wi
Source: stv.tv (UK)
Mar 2, 2010
An attempt to resolve one of Irish history’s most hotly disputed controversies is being tackled by Scottish academics it has been revealed.
University language experts have been given the go-ahead to use cutting-edge software technology to pore over thousands of witness accounts of an alleged massacre of Protestants centuries ago.
The so-called Depositions of English and Scottish settlers at the coal face of the 1641 Rising by Catholic rebels have been exploited by hist
Source: AP
Mar 2, 2010
Publication has been halted for a disputed book about the atomic bombing of Japan that “Avatar” director James Cameron had optioned for a possible film, The Associated Press has learned.
Publisher Henry Holt and Company, responding to questions from the AP, said Monday that author Charles Pellegrino “was not able to answer” concerns about “The Last Train from Hiroshima,” including whether two men mentioned in the book actually existed....
Doubts were first raised about
Source: NYT
Mar 1, 2010
Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas, and the Chinese Communist Party is not exactly itching to release its iron grip on society and the economy.
But that is exactly what the party needs to do to prolong the fast economic growth that underpins its political legitimacy: Cutting state-owned companies down to size and opening up to private enterprise hold the key to sustaining productivity gains and redistributing income more equitably.
Coming from Western economists, such a p
Source: NYT
Mar 1, 2010
The tangled oak woods of the Château de l’Écluse are inhabited by a great silence.
The descendants of Fernand Plée, who purchased these grounds and this red-brick manor in central France in 1941, say they have nothing to hide. Their grandfather, they say, was a good man: a decorated veteran of the First World War, a willing partner to the Allies in the second, a man of generosity and courage.
But an otherwise ordinary legal battle between the nearby town of Salbris and
Source: NYT
Mar 1, 2010
Half a century after his death at the hands of the K.G.B., Stepan Bandera, a World War II partisan, has not lost his ability to rally Ukrainians against Russia — and against each other.
Monuments to Mr. Bandera have sprung up across western Ukraine, his fight for the country’s independence glowingly recounted to schoolchildren on field trips, as if he were the George Washington of Ukrainian nationalism. But in eastern Ukraine and as far away as Moscow and Brussels, Mr. Bandera is reviled
Source: The Australian (AU)
Mar 1, 2010
AUSTRALIA'S curriculum chief today argued that the study of history would increase as he fended off allegations that he was promoting a"black armband"version of the past.
Professor Barry McGaw told The Australian Online that the proposed national curriculum did not underplay the role of Europeans in Australian history.
He was responding to opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne, who argued that the draft curriculum, unveiled today by Julia Gillard and Kevin Rud
Source: Sunday Times (UK)
Feb 28, 2010
The generals of Britain’s second world war book industry are planning a head-to-head clash with heavyweight new tomes retelling the story of the 1939-45 conflict.
Sir Max Hastings and Antony Beevor, who between them have covered campaigns from Normandy to Stalingrad and the Pacific, plan the 800-page volumes in 2012 as the pinnacles of their military history careers.
Beevor, author of Stalingrad, D-Day, and Berlin: the Downfall, has already won the first engagement with
Source: NYT
Feb 28, 2010
David Bankier, who helped expand the contours of Holocaust research by examining the participation of ordinary Europeans in the extermination of their Jewish neighbors, died over the weekend after a long illness, Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem Holocaust center, announced. He was 63.
Mr. Bankier, who was head of the International Institute for Holocaust Research at Yad Vashem, focused his scholarly work on anti-Semitism, especially its use by the Nazis to promote and sustain a broader ide
Source: NYT
Feb 28, 2010
The historian Gordon S. Wood won the American History Book Prize last week for “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815,” an account of how America’s leaders created the country’s democratic institutions. The award, presented by the New-York Historical Society, comes with a $50,000 prize, an engraved medal and the title of American Historian Laureate....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 27, 2010
Falkland Islanders have criticised the Government's official history of the 1982 war, claiming that it contains a series of "serious" errors which make it too sympathetic to Argentina's claims to the territory.
The critics say that several apparent statements of fact in the book are "nonsense" and "seriously defective", making Buenos Aires's historical claim to the South Atlantic archipelago "appear stronger than it actually is".
Source: WaPo
Feb 26, 2010
"Sorry I'm a little late. I had this thing I had to do," joked President Obama, just before an afternoon ceremony at the White House on Thursday in which luminaries in the arts and academics were presented with the highest medals for achievements in their fields....
The humanities citations went to prizewinning authors and historians Robert A. Caro ("The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, Means of Ascent and Master of the Senate"), Annette Gordon-Reed (&
Source: Jaime Glazov at FrontPageMag
Feb 26, 2010
[Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Russian, U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He is the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union and is the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. His new book is United in Hate: The Left's Romance with Tyranny and Terror. Email him at jamieglazov11@gmail.com.]In this special edition of F
Source: Independent (UK)
Feb 26, 2010
Spain's King Juan Carlos is admired for many things here, such as his historic role in the transition to democracy, or his diplomatic clout in the US and Latin America
. But openness to the public? That's not a trait often associated with the Spanish monarchy.
The King's secrecy, in fact, is seen as the key to his past success as a behind-the-scenes mediator between the country's political factions. But a new era is apparently dawning at the Zarzuela, the country estate the K
