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: Charlotte Conservative News
Dec 6, 2009
Before the Democratic primary vote on Tuesday in Massachusetts to replace the late Senator Ted Kennedy, a chance to catch up with how just before Thanksgiving, historian Doris Kearns Goodwin — a Bay State resident and a favorite of NBC News where she regularly pops up to deliver conventional liberal wisdom in the guise of historic insights — crossed into partisan politics to campaign for one of the four liberal candidates.
On Sunday, November 22, Kearns was the star at a “Women at W
Source: New Zealand Herald
Dec 6, 2009
One of the country's most internationally renowned historians has serious head injuries after being struck by a truck while crossing Princes St in Auckland city.
Dame Judith Binney is in Auckland City Hospital with serious head injuries after being hit on Friday night. The truck stopped after hitting her in heavy rain.
Prime Minister John Key and culture minister Chris Finlayson were told of the accident only hours after it happened.
Binney is celebrated fo
Source: Financial Times
Dec 5, 2009
Many Swiss libraries devote more space to works about Switzerland's role in the second world war than to histories of watchmaking, pharmaceuticals - and even crossbows - combined.
That this small, neutral nation should exhibit such a vivid interest in the war says much about the intensity of feeling about what happened between Switzerland and its neighbours during the rise of Nazism and the conflagration beyond. For its detractors, Switzerland was the small, but significant, base th
Source: Business Standard
Dec 5, 2009
Christopher Hill (1912-2003), the brilliant British Marxist historian, reminded us that history and politics were two sides of the same coin. Which meant that historians were primarily interested in ideas not only because they influence societies but also because they reveal the societies that give rise to them. It also means that since politics is always in a state of flux, history had to be rewritten in every generation because, although the past doesn’t change, the present does; each generati
Source: Shropshire Star
Dec 4, 2009
TV historian Adam Hart-Davis stopped off in Ironbridge to help round off the 300th anniversary celebrations of Abraham Darby’s ground-breaking first use of coke to smelt iron.
The star was at Enginuity in Ironbridge to deliver a lecture on industry and the environment, just days before the climate change summit in Copenhagen, which starts on Monday.
The lecture on Tuesday was jointly sponsored by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust and the University of Birmingham.
Source: Hurriyet Daily News
Dec 4, 2009
Fabio L Grassi is an Italian historian who has been living in Istanbul since 1998. The writer of the first Italian-language biography of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Grassi says he admires the man without sacrificing his objectivity. 'Let us try neither to anachronistically condemn the past nor look at things with the eyes of the 1920s and 1930s,' the author says
Fabio L. Grassi was always interested in history, but it was a university professor of his who set him down the road of Turkish
Source: Bsanna News
Dec 4, 2009
President of the Republic of Bulgaria Georgi Parvanov awarded Thursday Serbian writer and Vice President of the Serbian PEN Center prof. dr. Mihailo Pantic and historian and byzantinist Srdjan Pirivatric, the Serbian Ministry of Culture stated.
At the awarding ceremony in the Bulgarian Presidency, Pantic was presented with the Holly Brothers Cyril and Methodius award for his contribution to the popularization of the Bulgarian culture in Serbia and promotion of relation between the B
Source: The Washington Post
Dec 4, 2009
If Barack Obama's 2008 election is history's answer to Martin Luther King's 46-year-old "I Have a Dream" speech, then African Americans must be on the cusp of . . . what, exactly? In "Yes We Did?" historian Cynthia Griggs Fleming offers an academic overview of the civil rights movement's triumphant past and uncertain future.
Drawing on interviews with prominent black leaders -- including former Senator Carol Moseley Braun, Freedom marcher and Georgia Congressman
Source: CNN
Dec 4, 2009
James Gordon Meek was standing over the gravestone of a friend killed in Iraq when he noticed a familiar figure walking near him.
President Obama was walking through what's called "the saddest acre in America," Section 60 of Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. The section is the burial ground for U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Obama hugged graveside visitors, shook hands and listened to mourners while a "bone-chilling drizzle" fel
Source: Huffington Post
Dec 3, 2009
As I am typing this, I am five hours and 25 minutes into a 15+ hour trip on a slow train to Baltimore. I'm en route to D.C. to interview sociologist and author Dr. James Loewen for my documentary film, A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada. This interview is two years in the making. In late 2007 when I originally conceived the idea to make a feature documentary on how Canada's over 200 years of institutionalized slavery of indigenous and African people is constantly escaping
Source: Temple University
Dec 3, 2009
As President Barack Obama announces his new blueprint for the war in Afghanistan, which includes an increase of up to 30,000 U.S. troops, it can be easy to take for granted that those troops come from an all-volunteer force.
It has been a full 37 years since President Nixon fulfilled his campaign promise and ended the draft in 1973, shortly after the last American combat troops returned from Vietnam. In America’s Army: Making the All-Volunteer Force, Temple historian Beth Bailey tel
Source: Andrew Smith's Blog
Dec 3, 2009
The British business and economic historian Kevin Tennent has published some thoughts about whether an independent Scotland would be a viable economic unit. On Monday, Scotland’s first minister announced that the country would soon be holding a referendum on independence. Monday was, of course, St Andrew’s day, the national day of Scotland– and the day of your humble narrator’s patron saint!
Tennent’s blog post draws on his extensive knowledge of Scottish, British, and global econom
Source: Columbia Spectator
Dec 3, 2009
The West Harlem that Grace Jones knew as a child in the 1940s barely resembles today’s bustling neighborhood north of 125th Street.
With a substantial reduction in crime, an upsurge in real estate prices, and an influx of retail chains, Harlem has become a completely different world for Jones.
“This used to be a block of nothing but African Americans and Caribbean Americans,” she said, pointing out the middle- and upper-class residents increasingly making their way into
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Dec 3, 2009
The annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association opened here on Wednesday, and its official theme is "The End/s of Anthropology." But people here might suspect that one thing will never end: the controversy surrounding Darkness in El Dorado, a 2000 book that accused two prominent scholars of misdeeds in their work with an indigenous community in South America.
Debate over the book consumed the anthropologists' meeting in 2000. Nine years later, the passions s
Source: NRC Handelsblad
Dec 3, 2009
The late prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, husband of former queen Juliana, was party to an attempted coup against the government of the young Indonesian republic in 1950, a book published this Monday asserts.
The Dutch writers, historian Harry Veenendaal and journalist Jort Kelder, base their conclusions on evidence that has been available to other researchers: archived diaries of a court secretary and military police reports describing the attempted coup d'état which mention th
Source: Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books
Dec 2, 2009
[Garry Wills is Professor of History Emeritus at Northwestern. His most recent book, What Jesus Meant, was published in 2006.]
I did not think he would lose me so soon—sooner than Bill Clinton did. Like many people, I was deeply invested in the success of our first African-American president. I had written op-ed pieces and articles to support him in The New York Times and The New York Review of Books. My wife and I had maxed out in donations for him. Our children had been ardent for
Source: Al Jazeera
Dec 2, 2009
The US president's decision to send 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan has received a mixed reaction from American pundits in Washington.
Tariq Ali, a historian and political activist, told Al Jazeera that Barack Obama's decision to send more troops echoed the policies of George Bush, the former president.
"Obama is masqueraded as a peace president and he's now deciding to send more troops... In order to try and appease his own supporters, he's giving an approxim
Source: The Daily Herald
Dec 2, 2009
Between preparing for the premiere of his documentary and promoting it with the likes of Matt Damon and Viggo Mortensen, historian and activist Howard Zinn found some time to speak with students at Dundee-Crown High School on Tuesday.
After school let out, Zinn fielded questions via teleconference from about 30 students gathered in the school's music wing.
The question-and-answer session with the renowned author of "A People's History of the United States" was
Source: Redstone Rocket
Dec 1, 2009
In November 1979, Mike Baker was working on building shrimp boats. It was while working on a boat when someone yelled to him that he needed to call home become someone from the Army was calling him about a job.
“Hard to believe that was 30 years ago,” Baker mused in his Sparkman Center Office. “Thirty years… Wow.”
The “job” was to work at the then Missile Command’s History Office as the command’s archivist. It was a job and an office that he would never leave.
Source: NYT
Dec 1, 2009
[David S. Reynolds, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, is the author of “John Brown, Abolitionist” and “Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson.”]
IT’S important for Americans to recognize our national heroes, even those who have been despised by history. Take John Brown.
Today is the 150th anniversary of Brown’s hanging — the grim punishment for his raid weeks earlier on Harpers Ferry, Va. With a small band of abolitionists, Brown had seized the federal arsen
