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: National Humanities Alliance
Feb 1, 2010
In The Audacity of Hope, author Barack Obama recounts a conversation he had with MIT scientist Robert Langer at Northwestern University’s 2006 commencement in which they discuss a declining federal investment in research and development through the nation’s higher education institutions. The passage is important because it lays the intellectual groundwork for the soon-to-be Presidential candidate’s innovation agenda, including a $42 billion proposa
Source: History Today
Feb 1, 2010
[Roger Crowley was born in 1951 and spent part of his childhood in Malta. He read English at Cambridge University and taught English in Istanbul, where he developed a strong interest in the history of Turkey. He has traveled widely throughout the Mediterranean basin over many years and has a wide-ranging knowledge of its history and culture. He lives in Gloucestershire, England. He is also the author of 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West.]
In O
Source: Front Page Mag
Feb 1, 2010
A lecture last week at the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) offered a mixture of intellectually deficient material mixed with a dash of bigotry. It was delivered by Joseph Massad, associate professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at Columbia University.
The topic of Massad’s lecture was “Pre-Positional Conjunctions: Sexuality and/in Islam.” While past CNES lectures resulted in Israel-bashing and anti-Semitism, UCLA finally decided to honor its commitmen
Source: Smithsonian Magazine
Feb 1, 2010
When Mark Lehner was a teenager in the late 1960s, his parents introduced him to the writings of the famed clairvoyant Edgar Cayce. During one of his trances, Cayce, who died in 1945, saw that refugees from the lost city of Atlantis buried their secrets in a hall of records under the Sphinx and that the hall would be discovered before the end of the 20th century.
In 1971, Lehner, a bored sophomore at the University of North Dakota, wasn’t planning to search for lost civilizations, b
Source: FOX News
Jan 30, 2010
The similarities between Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter are undeniable.
Carter studied nuclear physics and taught Sunday School. Obama edited the Harvard Law Review and taught constitutional law. Both can flash a million-dollar smile. And both won the Nobel Peace Prize....
Historian Walter Russell Mead argues both men came to power after exceptionally turbulent times. The Vietnam-Watergate era for Carter. The post-9/11 "war on terror" period for Obama.
Source: NYT
Jan 30, 2010
I had lunch with Howard Zinn just a few weeks ago, and I’ve seldom had more fun while talking about so many matters that were unreservedly unpleasant: the sorry state of government and politics in the U.S., the tragic futility of our escalation in Afghanistan, the plight of working people in an economy rigged to benefit the rich and powerful.
Mr. Zinn could talk about all of that and more without losing his sense of humor. He was a historian with a big, engaging smile that seemed ev
Source: NYT
Jan 29, 2010
Louis R. Harlan, whose definitive two-volume biography of Booker T. Washington convincingly embraced its subject’s daunting complexities and ambiguities and won both the Bancroft Prize and the Pulitzer Prize, died on Jan. 22 in Lexington, Va. He was 87....
Mr. Harlan, a white Southerner, made race relations and Southern history his field of inquiry after attending a guest lecture by John Hope Franklin at Johns Hopkins University in the 1940s. When the historian Marquis James died in
Source: Newark Star-Ledger
Jan 28, 2010
As a business historian, Richard Tedlow has studied just about every big business disaster in America....
"It’s hard to beat denial, because it’s comfortable. It’s everywhere, just everywhere," said Tedlow, a Harvard University Business School professor and the author of several business-related books.
His newest book — "Denial: Why Business Leaders Fail to Look Facts in the Face — And What to Do About It" — is to be released in March. In it, Tedlow
Source: Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Jan 28, 2010
...Professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, Julian Zelizer, said voters would appreciate the President being frank about his political setbacks.
"I do think people like that aspect of him. He's very direct, he's honest about the problems he faces and about what he wants to do and his aspirations," he said.
Professor Zelizer said Mr Obama's speech was "solid" but not remarkable.
"It wasn't a stunning speech,&q
Source: ABC News
Jan 28, 2010
A noted Supreme Court historian who “enthusiastically” voted for President Obama in November 2008 today called President Obama’s criticism of the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address last night “really unusual” and said he wouldn’t be surprised if no Supreme Court Justices attend the speech next year.
“It was really unusual in my mind to see the president going after the Supreme Court in such a forum,” said author and Law Professor Lucas Powe, the Anne Green Regents Chair
Source: Various
Jan 27, 2010
Sean WilentzTo a point, he helped correct mainstream popular conceptions of American history that were highly biased. But he ceased writing serious history. He had a very simplified view that everyone who was president was always a stinker and every left-winger was always great. That can't be true. A lot of people on the left spent their lives apologizing for one of the worst mass
Source: CNN.com
Jan 26, 2010
President Obama's State of the Union speech Wednesday will be a tough sell for millions of Americans struggling under the weight of an economic recession, political analysts said....
Other presidents in their first term faced similar economic hurdles Obama is facing. In their first State of the Union speeches, President Reagan in 1982 and President Clinton in 1994 aimed to ease the nation's worries about tough economic times.
"While not quite as dramatic as Bill Cl
Source: NYT
Jan 25, 2010
It was the height of the Cultural Revolution, but in the heart of China’s capital, in range of the prying eyes of foreign embassies, young Beijingers had embraced the tenets of capitalism....
Such was the state of affairs in 1966, when selling pigeons at an impromptu street market was seen as an obstacle to the triumph of socialism — and, the official added, as a waste of bird feed, too....
The files of the Cultural Revolution, which raged from 1966 until Mao’s death i
Source: New Zealand Herald
Jan 25, 2010
Just ahead of the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, Israel's Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem is displaying what they say are the blueprints of Auschwitz, the notorious Polish camp that has become a symbol of the Nazi genocide of European Jewry.
However, an architectural historian and leading expert on Auschwitz, has publicly denounced the importance of the release, suggesting the plans were fakes, motivated by the lucrative market in Nazi memorabilia and documents....
Source: Cumberland Sentinel
Jan 24, 2010
Col. George Pappas was not one to glide gently into his golden years when he could make one final charge for the field of military history.
It was December 1973 and Pappas knew that within nine months he would face mandatory retirement after 30 years of Army service.
“That did not stop him from making one of the greatest acquisitions any institution had ever made,” said Richard Sommers, senior historian at the Military History Institute in Middlesex Township.
Source: Ray Smock
Jan 23, 2010
[Ray Smock is the former Historian of the U. S. House of Representatives (1983-95). He is a graduate of Roosevelt University in Chicago and holds the Ph.D. in history from the University of Maryland at College Park. He was co-editor of the 14-volume documentary series The Booker T. Washington Papers. His latest book is Booker T. Washington: Black Leadership in the Age of Jim Crow (2009).]
Louis R. Harlan, University Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at the University of M
Source: Politico
Jan 22, 2010
Viewers tuning into MSNBC at 5 p.m. on Friday would have seen Chris Matthews riffing on President Barack Obama's speech in Ohio, while CNN's "The Situation Room" led with the earthquake in Haiti.
But Fox News wasn't focusing on the day's news. Instead, host Glenn Beck ran through the atrocities of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara — "the true unseen history of Marxism, progressivism and communism" as Beck described it — with some
Source: MinnPost.com
Jan 22, 2010
...Professor Alan Brinkley of Columbia University is... a leading historian of U.S. liberalism. So it was timely and slightly painful that Brinkley happened to be speaking at the Humphrey Institute [at the University of Minnesota] yesterday. His presentation was lightly historical, with references to U.S. presidents from FDR to the present. But mostly, Brinkley laid out his thinking about the current Obama moment, one year into the term. Listening to him, I had an overwhelming sense that he was
Source: Tablet
Jan 22, 2010
Tariq Ramadan is coming to America. Is it a mistake for the Obama administration to let him in?It’s a good move for the U.S. to encourage freedom of speech and open debate. It’s a mistake, however, to imagine that he has positive contributions to make....I do think it’s worth the trouble to look into his deep thoughts, and to notice how problematic they are... He opposes terrorism but he does it with a series of asterisks. If you read the footnote in tiny print you dis
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 21, 2010
[Stephen Joel Trachtenberg is president emeritus and university professor of public service at George Washington University.]
Even old news can be dismal, and that is the case at hand. For about 40 years, by my calculation, American universities have been admitting too many candidates for doctorates in the liberal arts and the social sciences and, startling attrition along the way notwithstanding, have produced too great a supply of Ph.D.'s for a dwindling demand. There are pr
