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: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Dec 14, 2009
Funding for the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History (TAH) program would remain at $119 million under the fiscal year 2010 omnibus spending bill passed by Congress on December 13. Funding for the program has remained relatively constant since FY 2004, fluctuating annually between $120 million and $118 million.
The National Historical Publications and Records Commission’s (NHPRC) budget would increase from the current fiscal year’s $11.25 million to $1
Source: Historian Ron Radosh at his blog
Dec 12, 2009
In 1997, Matt Damon played the part of a janitor who turned out to be not only a math wizard, but one of the most brilliant men you could find anywhere. Trying to impress an arrogant Harvard student, who thought he knew everything, Damon’s character quotes from Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. He tells the Harvard kid and a psychiatrist at the hospital he works at that “you’re surrounding yourself with all the wrong fuckin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read
Source: Jonathan Foreman at the WSJ
Dec 11, 2009
Paul Johnson is the most celebrated and best-loved British historian in America, especially by readers of a conservative bent. Astonishingly prolific, he has over three decades produced a series of serious best sellers, all of which present a refreshingly revisionist take on their subjects. Most controversial of all, perhaps, was his defense of Richard Nixon in his "A History of the American People." But there is plenty in each of his histories to startle readers used to conventional w
Source: Victoria Bynum at the Renegade South blog
Dec 10, 2009
Professor Stauffer is angry at me; I mean really angry. He’s furious that I don’t think more highly of his and Sally Jenkins’s book, State of Jones, but especially that I have the temerity to publicly say so. To get it all off his chest, he just let off more steam on page 2 of the December 10th issue of the Jones County ReView.Why, he
Source: NYT
Dec 10, 2009
Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, a groundbreaking and wide-ranging scholar of Jewish history whose meditation on the tension between collective memory of a people and the more prosaic factual record of the past influenced a generation of thinkers, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 77 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was emphysema, said his wife, Ophra Yerushalmi, a concert pianist.
An elegant writer and mesmerizing raconteur, Dr. Yerushalmi earned his reputation as one of his
Source: Robert Dallek in USA Today
Dec 9, 2009
[Presidential historian Robert Dallek's new book, The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, will be published next year.]
As President Obama moves ahead with his expansion of the war in Afghanistan, history suggests that he has a better chance of being wrong than right.
Judging from the experience of Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, miscalculations about war and peace are all too common. Despit
Source: World Bulletin
Dec 9, 2009
Turkey's internationally-acclaimed historian Prof. Kemal Karpat has received Turkish parliament's honorary award.
Turkish Parliament Speaker Mehmet Ali Sahin presented the award to Karpat at ceremony in the Turkish capital, Ankara, on Wednesday.
"I have never worked to get a prize and never have never thought I would get one someday. My only goal has been to discover my own people and to tell about them," Karpat said.
Kemal Karpat is a professor e
Source: The Star
Dec 9, 2009
Women's rights are under attack, says historian Barbara Berg.
Yes, women have made tremendous strides but many of their rights have eroded since feminism's second wave in the 1970s and 1980s, she writes in her new book, Sexism in America: Alive, Well, and Ruining our Future.
I reached the longtime married mother of three at her home in New York City.
This is an edited version of our 90-minute conversation.
Q: You surveyed some 200 women, and in
Source: VOV News
Dec 9, 2009
As an independent researcher, Stein Tonnesson challenges the existing conceptions of the Indochina war by elucidating the forces at work preceding the war’s breakout in 1946.
Referring to French and English documents, Tonnesson sourced materials for his book from some translated Vietnamese texts on Vietnam in 1946 as well as from the memoirs of the famous Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. He visited the Vietnam Revolutionary Museum and the Ho Chi Minh Museum to see objects from th
Source: SF Chronicle
Dec 8, 2009
Stanley Karnow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and longtime foreign correspondent, is trying to think of a good title for a planned memoir.
One candidate: "Interesting Times."
"You know what the Chinese curse is? `May you live in interesting times,'" he says.
Interesting times: covering the war in Vietnam, from the first Americans killed, in 1959; traveling to China for President Richard M. Nixon's 1972 visit; Karnow's friendship w
Source: The Gainesville Sun
Dec 8, 2009
Four University of Florida graduate students who did research for a tobacco company's legal defense have been caught in a debate over the role of historians in such cases.
The controversy stretches from Gainesville to Palo Alto, Calif., where Stanford University history professor Robert Proctor has publicly identified and criticized historians who work for the tobacco industry. Proctor's discovery that UF graduate students in history were working for R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. attorn
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
Dec 8, 2009
On a windy Tuesday evening in November, a student crowd filled the 1,200-plus-capacity Irvine Auditorium on the Penn campus.
They'd come to catch the crème of hip-hop's past (Run-DMC's Darryl McDaniels) and present (Lupe Fiasco) in person and watch footage of John Legend, Bruce Springsteen and Eddie Vedder performing protest songs.
The message: Change isn't a marketing term Barack Obama made up. America's victories of diversity and innovation came not from presidents or
Source: Press Release
Dec 8, 2009
It is my great pleasure to inform you that the OAH has a new Executive Director. After an extensive process that resulted in 54 applications, Katherine (Kathy) Finley has been selected by the OAH Executive Board at its Fall board meeting.
Kathy holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in history, and has served history museums and associations. In addition to her passion for history, she is also a trained and seasoned nonprofit executive whose experience and talents will help us a
Source: Yahoo News
Dec 7, 2009
Y2K, the first year of a new century, arrived after much anticipation. Any decade is going to be full of the predictable and the unexpected — this one was no different. We talked to a few historians to make sense of what happened.
“The new century began on a bang, and it was a shot heard ’round the world,” Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a history professor at San Diego State University, said, speaking of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
“People are going to think that
Source: Press Release
Dec 7, 2009
On Sunday, December 13, at 8 PM Eastern and Pacific / 7 PM Central, THE PEOPLE SPEAK -- the long awaited documentary film inspired by Howard Zinn's books A People's History of the United States and, with Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's History of the United States -- will air on History.
Tune in!
More details are at http://www.history.com/peoplespeak
ABOUT THE PEOPLE SPEAK
Using dramatic and
Source: NYT
Dec 7, 2009
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- A Polish historian says he made a surprising find when poring through World War I archives -- the death certificate of Manfred von Richthofen, the German fighter ace known as the ''Red Baron.''
Maciej Kowalczyk said Monday that he found the file last month while going through old German archives in the western Polish city of Ostrow Wielkopolski. The area was formerly German, and Richthofen was briefly stationed there.
The entry is a one-page handw
Source: Balkan Insight
Dec 7, 2009
Dusan Batakovic, 52, a Serbian historian and diplomat, has been handed the most demanding role of his life - to lead the Serbian team at the International Court of Justice in the Hague, in an attempt to dispute the legality of Kosovo’s unilateral proclamation of independence on February 17, 2008.
The Serbian team is composed mostly of legal experts, but having a historian at the helm indicates that the Serbian side might be paying some attention to the deeper causes of the Serb-Alb
Source: WSJ
Dec 7, 2009
Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was an influential historian, minor Victorian politician and the author of India's legal code. His educational reforms in India are largely the reason English is the tongue that unites the subcontinent today. His greatest literary legacy was the "History of England From the Accession of James II," which established the Whig or "progressive" view of history. In all, a life of influence in many spheres, and generally for the good.
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Dec 6, 2009
In 1991, Donald W. Livingston threw a party—well, a conference—and nobody showed up.
It was during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and Mr. Livingston, a professor of philosophy at Emory University and raised in South Carolina, decided there should be more thoughtful discourse on the topic of secession.
A political philosopher who specializes in David Hume, he searched philosophy papers published since 1940 and turned up only seven on the matter of secession from fe
Source: The Buffalo News
Dec 6, 2009
Architectural historian Martin Wachadlo served two decades in the U.S. Navy before a Victorian beauty on West Avenue caught his eye. Simple and unassuming, well-designed and solidly built, his old house became a life project — much like his obsession with architecture.
At age 47, Wachadlo is considered an expert on Buffalo's stock of old buildings — compiling neighborhood surveys, researching historic districts, drafting National Register nominations. With an advanced degree in arch
