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: UVA Today (University of Virginia)
Sep 3, 2009
William Wright Abbot III, a former editor of The Papers of George Washington and an expert in early American history, died Aug. 31 in Charlottesville. He was 87.
Abbot taught early American history, but among historians he was best known as the chief editor of The Papers of George Washington, housed in the University of Virginia Library, from 1977 until '92. One of the founders of the Association for Documentary Editing, he also edited The William and Mary Quarterly from 1961 to '66
Source: The Faster Times
Sep 3, 2009
Shlomo Sand is pissed off. Sand, an Israeli historian, contends that there is no such thing as the “the Jewish people,” not now, not ever. Sure, Jews exist, but the people is an invention, a lie constructed by Zionist intellectuals in search of a national myth. But what really gets him boiling is that this myth-of an exiled people returning to their land, and of the “ethno-biological” ties between all Jews-has been used to create a country that “grossly discriminates” against its non-Jewish c
Source: The Huffington Post
Sep 3, 2009
Two Kings County historians are sparring over factual inaccuracies in one of their books, and the fight is getting so intense that it seems they actually believe the adage that only the winner gets to write history.
The book feud — the borough’s biggest since Park Slope and Prospect Heights battled it out for literary supremacy – started when history writer and memorabilia collector Brian Merlis sent The Brooklyn Paper a scathing review of former Brooklyn Borough Historian John Manb
Source: Google New
Sep 3, 2009
MADRID — A Spanish newspaper is defending its plans to publish an interview this weekend with a British writer who denies the Holocaust, despite a furious complaint from Israel.
The center-right daily El Mundo plans to run the interview Saturday with David Irving, who served 13 months in prison in Austria after being convicted there in 2006 over charges he denied the Nazis exterminated 6 million Jews.
It is part of a series of six interviews with World War II experts, t
Source: Press Trust of India
Sep 3, 2009
Kochi, Sept 3 (PTI) Former Naval vice-chief Admiral (Retd) G M Hiranandani died of heart attack at Malakkara village near Chengannur, 117 km from Thiruvananthapuram, in Kerala's Alappuzha district.
Hiranandani, also an eminent Naval historian, died on Tuesday. He was 78 and is survived by a son and daughter...
... Hiranandani, a gallantry award winner, joined the Indian Navy in 1949. He had undergone extensive training in United Kingdom with the Royal Navy at different
Source: Luton Today
Sep 3, 2009
A historian stopped in Luton as part of a 300 mile walk to raise awareness for a World Heritage bid.
Ged Lynn, 37, is promoting two monasteries near to his home in Jarrow, Tyne and Wear, which are the UK's only bid to gain World Heritage status in 2010.
He left Jarrow on August 9 and arrived in Luton on the 17th day of his mammoth journey, after trekking the hardest part of the trip - from Leicester to Luton.
He hoped to reach his last spot, Guildford, on T
Source: http://www.medievalists.net
Sep 3, 2009
Rodney Stark, Professor of the Social Sciences at Baylor University is a well-known scholar of religious history who has published over two dozen books. In his latest work, God’s Battalions, Professor Stark puts forth a controversial argument that the Crusades were a justified war waged against Muslim terror and aggression.
According to its publisher, “Stark reviews the history of the seven major Crusades from 1095 to 1291, demonstrating that the Crusades were precipitated by Islam
Source: American Historical Association
Sep 2, 2009
[John Dichtl is the executive director of the National Council on Public History.
Robert Townsend is the AHA’s assistant director for research and publications.]Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of articles analyzing results from the 2008 Survey of Public History Professionals. This article will also appear in Public History News, the newsletter of the National Council on Public History
Public history is one of the least understood areas of profess
Source: Jewish Info News
Sep 2, 2009
Arnold Reisman is a distinguished American scholar and author. His latest book, “Shoah: Turkey, the US and the UK,” due to be published late September by BookSurge and available on Amazon, addresses the little known role that the Republic of Turkey played in saving Jewish lives before, during, and for three years after WWII.
Reisman explains that the job of the historian is to write about history. By reproducing a multitude of archival documents and testimonies, most of which have
Source: The Bee
Sep 2, 2009
The OMNIMAX Theater at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) was filled with people who came to hear internationally renowned authority on space exploration and NASA historian Andrew Chaikin speak, on July 28.
Chaikin's books include the best-selling chronicle of the Apollo moon missions “A Man on the Moon”, which served as the primary basis for Tom Hanks’ Emmy-winning HBO miniseries, “From the Earth to the Moon”.
“We look for opportunities to bring acknowled
Source: Washington Post
Sep 2, 2009
Whole Foods chief executive John Mackey wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal last month advocating health care reform but arguing that new health-care entitlements were not the answer. He proposed ways to achieve reform without expanding the government and with greater emphasis on individual responsibility. Some consumers took issue with Mackey's views, creating a web site, Boycott Whole Foods, and arguing that his piece suggested "healthcare is a commodity that only the rich, like him,
Source: BBC (Radio 4)
Sep 2, 2009
Historians Helen Rappaport and Lisa Hilton discuss whether women are guilty of "feminising" their subject and inflating the role of women in history. Go to Podcast
Source: DailyProgress.com
Sep 2, 2009
William Wright Abbot III of Charlottesville, Virginia, died peacefully in his sleep on Monday, August 31, 2009, at the age of 87.
Professor Abbot was born in Louisville, Georgia, on May 20, 1922, the son William Wright Abbot Jr. and Lillian Carswell Abbot.
He graduated from Louisville Academy, a public high school, in 1939 and attended Davidson College for two years. In 1941 he transferred to the University of Georgia, where he was awarded the baccalaureate degree upon
Source: Robert Townsend in the AHA magazine, Perspectives on History
Sep 1, 2009
Related Links
Inside Higher Ed: The Economic Freeze on History
Heading into the new academic year, history departments across the country are struggling through a wide range of cuts and general uncertainty about their departmental budgets. The effects of the current down economy seem to be affecting most departments—whether large, medium, or small, and at private as well as p
Source: Humanities
Sep 1, 2009
Soon after earning her bachelor’s degree in English from Tufts, Jill Lepore started working at Harvard, but not as a member of the faculty. The future David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History was clocking hours as a secretary on temporary assignment. But she was also writing up a storm, auditing courses, and thinking about attending grad school. In a conversation that opens with high-school recollections before venturing into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, Lepore descri
Source: SF Gate
Sep 1, 2009
"The Death of Conservatism" (Random House, 120 pages, $17), by Sam Tanenhaus: Its provocative title notwithstanding, "The Death of Conservatism" does not eulogize what author Sam Tanenhaus rightly calls the dominant U.S. political force of the past 30 years. Instead, he argues that contemporary conservatism is outmoded, overly ideological and has failed to adapt to changing times and changing demographics.
Even in the face of the current economic crisis, "co
Source: The Independent
Sep 1, 2009
Christopher Elrington devoted the whole of his professional life as a historian to the Victoria County History, that magnificent encyclopaedic work attempting to provide fully researched and properly referenced historical accounts of all the counties of England and their more than 10,000 individual parishes. Some 250 large red volumes of the VCH have appeared since the endeavour began in 1899. Elrington had an increasingly influential hand in all the volumes that have appeared in the last 50 yea
Source: The Harvard Crimson
Aug 31, 2009
After a worldwide search for a candidate to fill Harvard’s new professorship in Chinese social history, former Associate Professor Michael Szonyi was selected to assume the post on July 1, 2009.
Szonyi is a social historian who, in addition to reading historical texts, seeks to challenge historical accounts by speaking with village elders, collecting documents from villagers, and observing lineage and temple rituals in order to see history from a local perspective, he said.
Source: The Budapest Times
Aug 31, 2009
The nature of thinking is one of the core elements of this autobiographical memoir by Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs, or ‘autohistory’, as he calls it. That’s only one of the elements, but it’s a key one, as demonstrated by Lukacs putting his summarised views about history and historiography at the beginning of the book. Summarising a summary, Lukacs believes strongly in the interrelation between the historian and history, almost to the point of saying that without the historian there
Source: courant.com (Hartford Courant)
Aug 30, 2009
'They fear us because we have no fear." So go the words to the song that has become the anthem of the Honduran resistance.
Like many Hondurans determined to restore democracy and constitutional order, Darío A. Euraque has no fear of the politicos and generals who on June 28 kidnapped his country's democratically elected president at gunpoint and flew him into exile, imposing themselves as rulers of the land and brutally repressing peaceful protest with clubs, tear gas and bulle
