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: BBC
Oct 21, 2009
A leading historian has said Scotland must face up to"darker sides" of its history as well as celebrating its achievements.
Prof Tom Devine will deliver a talk in Inverness on Saturday entitled Did Slavery Make Scotland Great?
He told BBC Radio Scotland's Highland Cafe that the use of slaves by Scots plantation owners may have aided the country's economic growth in the past.
Prof Devine's lecture is a feature of Scotland's Global Impact Conference.
Source: NYUnews.com
Oct 21, 2009
Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand recently spoke at NYU about his newly translated book "The Invention of the Jewish People," a book that challenges conventional wisdom and deeply entrenched myths about the foundations of the state of Israel...
... Sand writes in his introduction, "I don't think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change it looks for different books." This book is an important contribution to the debate on the future
Source: AHA's magazine: Perspectives on History
Oct 21, 2009
Marriage, wrote historian William Alexander in 1779, “is so far from having been an institution, fixed by permanent and unalterable laws, that it has been continually varying in every period, and in every country.”1 Alexander’s recognition of the historical contingency of marriage is being confirmed by a growing body of scholarship exploring marriage, sexuality, and domestic unions across time and space. The next annual meeting of the AHA, to be held in San Diego in January 2010, will feature a
Source: thestar.com
Oct 20, 2009
Antony Beevor, having published internationally acclaimed World War II accounts of the battle of Stalingrad and the fall of Berlin, had assumed that his next front of historical endeavour would be the siege of Leningrad.
But the British author and professor was required to change his strategy earlier this decade when the Soviet archives that had served as the foundation for much of his work were closed to foreign researchers.
Beevor's colleagues even suggested that he w
Source: boston.com
Oct 20, 2009
A historian is casting doubt on one of the headlines about Senator Edward M. Kennedy's memoir -- that his brother Robert asked in a secret 1967 meeting then-President Lyndon B. Johnson to let him negotiate peace in Vietnam.
"He would shuttle back and forth between Washington and Saigon and would even travel to Hanoi and China if necessary — and Moscow — if Johnson would trust him to be the U.S. government’s agent in these secret negotiations," the late Massachusetts senato
Source: NYT
Oct 19, 2009
This week, Joshua B. Freeman, a historian and the author of “Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II” (The New Press, 2000), will be responding to readers’ questions about the history of the city’s unions, labor politics and changing work force.
Dr. Freeman is professor of history at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and is associated with its Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies. He has written e
Source: Northern Star
Oct 19, 2009
Jonathan Spence, Yale historian and leading authority on China, delivered the sixth annual W. Bruce Lincoln Lecture Monday.
Spence’s speech focused on China’s first visits to Europe in the 17th century and how the Chinese interacted with the English and the French at the time.
“The story I want to tell is how the Chinese tried to understand Western culture just as we tried to understand their culture,” Spence said.
Spence said the Western world was always i
Source: McGill Newsroom
Oct 19, 2009
Cundill International Prize in History at McGill Winner of world's largest non-fiction historical literature award to be chosen from list of three
Again this year, the jury for the Cundill International Prize in History at McGill struggled to make the shortlist from 10 very worthy contenders. "The debate was vigorous, occasionally heated, and altogether stimulating," said jury member Kenneth Whyte, who is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of Maclean's Magazine. "There wer
Source: NYT
Oct 19, 2009
After Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, this month proposed prohibiting the National Science Foundation from “wasting any federal research funding on political science projects,” political scientists rallied in opposition, pointing out that one of this year’s Nobel winners had been a frequent recipient of the very program now under attack.
Yet even some of the most vehement critics of the Coburn proposal acknowledge that political scientists themselves vigorously debate th
Source: Network of Concerned Historians
Oct 19, 2009
Dear colleagues,
The United Nations and the Organization of American States have recently developed ideas regarding a new human right of great importance to historians: the right to the truth, that is the right to know the truth about past human rights violations. Complete sets of the following documents are available in English, French, and Spanish at the website of the Network of Concerned Historians (http://www.concernedhistorians.org
Source: Hurriyet Daily News
Oct 19, 2009
Yerevan has already picked the Armenian historians expected to participate in the controversial history commission, although the historic agreement aimed at normalizing relations between Turkey and Armenia has yet to be ratified by either parliament.
Also, an Armenian historian who was born in Istanbul has been unofficially put in charge of the committee by the Turkish government.
The history commission, which is expected to be part of an intergovernmental commission be
Source: The Armenian Weekly
Oct 19, 2009
The protocols signed by the Turkish and Armenian foreign ministers in Zurich on Oct. 10 contain a clause that states the two sides agree to “implement a dialogue on the historical dimension with the aim to restore mutual confidence between the two nations, including an impartial and scientific examination of the historical records and archives to define existing problems and formulate recommendations.”
In the past few years, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS)
Source: Southern Highland News (Australia)
Oct 19, 2009
IT is the site earmarked for a major Landcom residential development, but Renwick was once the home base for displaced and orphaned children and wards of the state.
In fact, more than 30,000 both boys and girls were accommodated in farm homes across the 234-hectare property as well as Cottage Homes around Mittagong from 1881-1994.
The homes, over the years accommodated children from various walks of life, including orphans, state wards, mentally challenged and ill young
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Oct 18, 2009
HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. -- John Brown has spent 150 years locked in our national attic, the mad uncle no one wanted to acknowledge but over whose corpse soldiers would sing praises during the war he triggered.
The bearded messiah of the antislavery movement was hanged for his futile raid on the federal armory here. After 15 decades of neglect, historians are now praising, damning and pondering Brown's legacy on the sesquicentennial of the Harpers Ferry raid.
In an era in w
Source: The Washington Institute For Near East Policy
Oct 17, 2009
(LEESBURG, VA) -- A Safe Haven: Harry S. Truman and the Founding of Israel,Allis and Ronald Radosh's suspenseful, meticulously documented account of Truman's controversial decision to recognize the new state of Israel, has won the Gold Prize -- including a cash award of $30,000 -- in The Washington Institute's 2009 Book Prize competition, the research institution announced today.
The Book Prize, established to highlight new nonfiction books on the Middle East, is among the world's m
Source: Deseret News (Utah)
Oct 17, 2009
The United States is learning that, in many ways, Iraq is three nations in one — just as the British and Ottoman Empire learned, a University of Utah military historian said.
Speaking to about 25 military history buffs at the Fort Douglas Military History Symposium on Saturday, U. historian John Reed said Iraq comprises the Kurd majority in the north, the Sunni majority in the so-called "Sunni triangle" in the central part of the country including Baghdad, and the Shiites
Source: Times of India
Oct 17, 2009
Renowned Pakistani historian Ayesha Jalal has chronicled the spread of jihad in South Asia over three centuries. Jalal, a professor of history at Tufts University and author of Partisans of Allah: Jihad in South Asia, spoke to TOI Crest about Pakistan's war on Taliban.Is Pakistan losing its war on the Taliban given the string of recent attacks on targets such as the heavily guarded army headquarters in Rawalpindi?
I would not say Pakistan is 'losing' the war against the
Source: WTRF 7 (West Virginia)
Oct 16, 2009
WHEELING -- Newt Gingrich spoke about 45 minutes, on a variety of topics at Capitol Theatre Friday.
The event was free to the public, and it drew people from all ages and walks of life.
Gingrich is a writer and historian as well as a politician.
He spoke of the book he wrote with his daughter, "The Five Principles Of A Successful Life."
He listed the five principles as: dream big, work hard, learn every day, do things you enjoy and be
Source: chroniclelive.co.uk
Oct 16, 2009
FOR the past 10 years it has been an obsession for local historian Mick Hardy, and now his project is complete.
Mick has painstakingly sifted through thousands of documents, old news paper cuttings, death records, interviewed residents and put out appeals through the Chronicle to find as much information as possible about the 565 people who died in the First and Second World Wars from his village and surrounding area.
And now he, with pals Iain Mutch and Malcolm Anderso
Source: JuraForum
Oct 16, 2009
A faked telegram from a sick relative, knockout drops in a glass of beer or simply brute force - the methods used by the East German secret police, the "Stasi", were varied and imaginative when it came to kidnapping opponents and critics of the East German regime in West Germany and putting them on trial in the GDR. Historian Susanne Muhle (29) has found over 400 cases in the files of the Birthler Agency (named after Marianne Birthler, who heads the agency that oversees the archives ho
