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: Salem News Online
Jun 25, 2009
SALEM — Two doctoral students in history from Peking University in China had lunch this week at Red's Sandwich Shop. Gao Hao had the open-faced barbecue sandwich, while Huang Shuo chose the Cuban, which is stuffed with roast pork, onions and pickles.
There should be a lot of dining scenes like that the next few days as the World History Association descends on the city for its 18th annual conference.
More than 400 scholars and teachers from the United States and around
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Jun 24, 2009
... Today the abbreviation LGBT (covering lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people) is commonplace. Things only become esoteric when people start adding Q (questioning) and I (intersex). And the scholarship keeps deepening. Six years ago, after publishing a brief survey of historical research on gay and lesbian life, I felt reasonably well-informed (at least for a rather unadventurous heteroetcetera). But having just read a new book by Sherry Wolf called Sexuality and Socialism: History
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Jun 24, 2009
Representatives Paul Tonko (D-NY) and Louise Slaughter (D-NY) are circulating a “Dear Colleague” letter in the House of Representatives encouraging Members of Congress to join their letter to the House Appropriations Committee urging $50 million for the Office of Museum Services (OMS) at the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).
Source: News announcement at the website of USC
Jun 24, 2009
Wal-Mart has come a long way since 1962, when founder Sam Walton opened his first discount store in Rogers, Arkansas. With nearly 8,000 retail outlets in 15 countries, 2.1 million employees worldwide, and sales of $401 billion for fiscal year 2009 alone, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. has become the largest company in the world and has changed the way the world does business.
In a new book titled "The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business" (Metropol
Source: PRnewswire
Jun 22, 2009
Gerhard L. Weinberg has been selected to receive the 2009 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The $100,000 honorarium, citation and medallion, sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation, will be presented at the Library's annual Liberty Gala on October 24, 2009 at Chicago's Palmer House Hilton Hotel. The announcement was made today via Internet webcast at www.pritzkermilitarylibrary.org
Source: NYT
Jun 22, 2009
Ralf Dahrendorf, a German sociologist whose experiences in Nazi Germany led him to develop a theory of liberalism and human freedom that often went against the grain of German politics in the postwar period, died Wednesday in Cologne. He was 80.
His death was confirmed in a statement from Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said, “Europe has lost one of its most important thinkers and intellectuals.” The cause was cancer, said his wife, Dr. Christiane Dahrendorf.
Democracy an
Source: State Department
Jun 19, 2009
Office of the Historian Announces New Website: www.history.state.gov
Office of the Spokesman
Washington, DC
June 18, 2009
The Department of State is pleased to announce the official unveiling of the Office of the Historian’s new website: www.history.state.gov.
The new website boasts greater accessibility and searching within the Foreign Relations of the United States documentary series. It currently offers both textual and facsimile copies of Foreign Relations volumes from the
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jun 19, 2009
My friend Phil Curtin died a couple of weeks ago. William Grimes published one of his characteristically nicely researched and written obits in The New York Times yesterday, accompanied by a nice photograph that was probably taken by his wife, Anne. Phil was 87 at the time of his death, and his health had been quite poor for the last couple of years. Still, it is hard to lose Phil.
Adria and I have been close to Phil and Anne since those years in the 1960s when we all lived in Madis
Source: CNN
Jun 19, 2009
In the 1960s and 1970s, Big Tobacco was widely viewed as the model for
effective special-interest lobbying."My own view is that in many ways, the tobacco industry invented the
kind of special-interest lobbying that has become so characteristic of
the late 20th- and earlier 21st-century American politics," said Allan
Brandt, dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.
The industry was known for its giant spending on political campaigns
and effective lobbyists. The indus
Source: Arizona Republic
Jun 18, 2009
The museum that holds prized artifacts from Phoenix's early days will close on June 30 because it doesn't have enough money to operate.
The Phoenix Museum of History would like to merge with another organization so that the museum can reopen later, officials say. It's unclear, however, if or when that would happen.
"We are hoping to come back stronger, but right now, the money is not there," said Frank Barrios president of the museum's board of trustees.
Source: Bob Bostock at the New Nixon blog
Jun 18, 2009
Shortly after becoming director of the Nixon Library in 2007, Dr. Timothy Naftali invited the nation’s press in to witness the removal of the Nixon Library’s Watergate exhibit. Declaring, “I can’t run a shrine,” he gleefully presided over the destruction of the exhibit, which resulted in numerous articles reporting that the “whitewash of Watergate” was over at the Nixon Library.
Dr. Naftali went on to assert, “The challenge is to present a controversial, traumatic and important stor
Source: AHA website (click here to read the letter)
Jun 17, 2009
AHA executive director Arnita Jones sent a letter today to Russian Federation president Dmitrii Medvedev, expressing concern on behalf of the American Historical Association over the recent creation of a Commission to Counteract Attempts at Falsifying History to Damage the Interests of Russia.
Source: http://thejakartaglobe.com
Jun 17, 2009
Singapore. Western governments supported the mass murder of more than half a million alleged communist supporters in the wake of the 1965 coup, a noted historian said on Wednesday.
Speaking on the opening day of an international conference in Singapore to discuss arguably the darkest chapter in Indonesia’s history, Bradley R. Simpson, an assistant professor at Princeton University and an expert on Indonesia, said that the US and British governments did everything in their power to e
Source: Press Release
Jun 17, 2009
The government's own secrets, lies and conspiracies have fueled a 45-year-long decline in America's trust in its leaders, a University of California, Davis, history professor argues in a new book.
Among the bizarre-but-documented conspiracies: U.S. plots to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro (one scheme involved dropping poison pills in his drinks; another called for planting an exploding seashell in his favorite scuba-diving bay); proposed military attacks on U.S. citizens as a pret
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jun 15, 2009
A non-traditional and sometimes iconoclastic law school has announced plans to create a new kind of undergraduate college -- one focused on history.
The new college will offer only the junior and senior years of instruction, will operate in a no-frills manner to keep costs down, and will offer the single major of history. The American College of History and Legal Studies will start offering classes in August 2010 and has been licensed to operate in Salem, N.H. -- just seven miles fr
Source: Thomas Sugrue in the summer issue of Democracy
Jun 15, 2009
In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama writes of "the psychodrama of the baby-boom generation" with its "old grudges and revenge plots." A case in point: A generation ago, a group of mostly white, boomer journalists and intellectuals published a series of influential books and articles on the "failure" of civil rights politics. Their accounts began with an idealized story of the Southern civil rights movement, focusing on the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960
Source: Press Release
Jun 15, 2009
This year, the Miller Center will fund its 90th Governing America in a Global Era (GAGE) fellow. The GAGE program puts the public in public intellectual. Initiated in 2000, the fellowship provides financial support to students who are completing their Ph.D. dissertation in fields that use history to shed light on contemporary U.S. domestic and foreign policies and politics. Besides identifying and supporting the next generation of cutting edge scholars, the program connects each fellow to a &quo
Source: LAT
Jun 14, 2009
Him Mark Lai, an engineer by training and historian by avocation whose groundbreaking scholarship and treasure trove of archival documents guided generations of scholars to study the daily lives and struggles of Chinese Americans, died May 21 in San Francisco. He was 83.
The cause was complications of cancer, according to his wife, Laura.
Unassuming but tenacious, Lai was often called the dean of Chinese American studies, a field that did not exist when he taught the fi
Source: Roger Moorhouse in the Independent
Jun 14, 2009
Antony Beevor is the doyen of British popular history. The world's bestselling military historian, with an astonishing four-million sales to his name, he has done more than any other current writer to drag history out of its ivory towers and into the nation's living-rooms.
Beevor came to prominence with two bestselling tomes, Stalingrad and Berlin, both of which deal with the eastern front of the Second World War. Now, however, he has turned his attention to the western theatre to t
Source: WaPo
Jun 14, 2009
Philip D. Curtin, a retired Johns Hopkins University professor and a historian of the African slave trade who was instrumental in changing the way schools teach the subject, died June 4 at Chester County Hospital in West Chester, Pa., of pneumonia. He was 87 and lived in Kennett Square, Pa.
Dr. Curtin, winner of a 1983 MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was a leading figure in reviving the neglected field of Afric
