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: AHA Blog
May 7, 2009
There are signs that the Google Book Settlement may be unraveling. Jennifer Howard at the Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog reports a delay at least to October, and some interest from the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Meanwhile, the library community, which will be key intermediaries in the proposed arrangements, raise significant concerns about privacy, access, and costs under the terms of the settlement in a new filing with the court. This bears close interest from the many independent
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 7, 2009
Louisiana State University Press, one of the South’s top scholarly publishers, could fall victim to its state’s budget hemorrhage, and supporters are rallying to keep it alive. The Louisiana Legislature wants to slash funds for higher education, and that includes a proposed $40-million cut for the press’s home institution, LSU at Baton Rouge, said Bob Mann, a professor of mass communication there. He also edits a series for the press.
The press counts on “a quarter of a percent” of
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 6, 2009
Two weeks ago I attended a moving conference at Rutgers University in honor of my late University of Wisconsin colleague, William Appleman Williams. Bill Williams was perhaps the most influential, and certainly the most controversial, of the U.S. diplomatic historians of the mid to late 20th century. Among his students can be counted three of the most distinguished living American diplomatic historians: Lloyd Gardner (Rutgers), Walter LaFeber (Cornell) and Thomas McCormick (Williams’s successor
Source: Philadelphia Bulletin
May 5, 2009
Unquestionably, hiring Steven J. Rosen to become part of the Middle East Forum was the most difficult decision since I founded the organization in 1994.Steven J. Rosen (left)
Source: Paul Gottfried in American Conservative
May 4, 2009
[Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities at
Elizabethtown College and the author of Encounters: My Life With
Nixon, Marcuse, and Other Friends and Teachers.]
ERIC FONER, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia
University, is the most professionally successful academic historian
of our time. He has served as president of all three major historical
organizations, published a widely acclaimed book on Reconstruction as
“America’s unfinished revolution,” and app
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
May 4, 2009
Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar recently announced the National Park Service will undertake more than 800 projects at parks across the country. The projects reflect an investment of $750 million in the national park system part of more than $3 billion the Interior Department is receiving under President Obama’s recovery plan. For a full list of the projects, go to the Department’s Recovery Web Site at www.interior.gov/recovery.
Al
Source: AP
May 4, 2009
A federal judge ruled that a public high school history teacher violated the First Amendment when he called creationism "superstitious nonsense" during a classroom lecture.
U.S. District Judge James Selna issued the ruling Friday after a 16-month legal battle between student Chad Farnan and his former teacher, James Corbett.
Farnan sued in U.S. District Court in 2007, alleging that Corbett violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment by making repe
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 4, 2009
Guenter Lewy, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is a scholar whose work has been praised by Turkey’s government. When the embassy of Turkey in Washington was upset over a PBS documentary on the Armenian genocide during World War I, the ambassador's statement on the program noted the work of "respected scholar Guenter Lewy, whose latest book The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide documents the incomplete historic r
Source: James McPherson in the WaPo
May 3, 2009
In May 1864, two armies clashed in a desperate struggle for the course of our nation's history. The Battle of the Wilderness was a great turning point of the Civil War -- the first clash between Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant and the beginning of the end for the beleaguered Confederacy. The fighting was so intense that the tangled underbrush caught fire, burning wounded soldiers alive.
To commemorate the bloody struggle, portions of the Wilderness -- which is near Locust Grove,
Source: LAT
May 3, 2009
A New York-born and Princeton-educated historian and commentator on Middle East affairs has been chosen Israel's next ambassador to Washington, Israeli news media reported Saturday.
According to the online edition of the newspaper Haaretz, Michael B. Oren’s selection by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will be submitted to the Cabinet for approval at its meeting today. Oren would replace Sallai Meridor.
Oren is a senior fellow at
Source: Paul Krugman at his NYT blog
May 2, 2009
Joe Nocera writes about Thursday’s New York Revie/PEN event on the economy, but fails to mention what I found the most depressing aspect of the whole thing: further confirmation that we’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics, in which hard-won knowledge has simply been forgotten.
What’s the evidence? Niall Ferguson “explaining” that fiscal expansion will actually be contractionary, because it will drive up interest rates. At least that’s what I think he said; there were so many f
Source: http://www.reporter.am
May 2, 2009
Historian Richard Hovannisian of the University of California, Los Angeles, met with Tatul Hakobyan of the Armenian Reporter on April 24 in Yerevan at the Armenian Center for National and International Studies (ACNIS), a think tank established by Armenia's first foreign minister, Raffi Hovannisian.
Tatul Hakobyan: Professor, in the early morning hours of April 23, Armenia and Turkey, through Swiss mediation, issued an optimistic joint statement announcing that they had charted a roa
Source: William Loren Katz in an email circulating on the Internet
May 2, 2009
[Mr. Katz, the author of forty U.S. history books, is affiliated with New York University. Click here for his website.] If water boarding is torture and a crime according to U.S. and international laws, shouldn't the United States bring some people to trial? President Obama insists we need to move ahead rather than prosecute, and this week he seemed to downgrade torture from a crime to a “mistake.”
An earlier President had another
Source: Management Review of the Office of the Historian Bureau of Public Affairs U.S. Department of State (May 2009)
May 1, 2009
PREFACE
This report was prepared by the Office of Inspector General (OIG) pursuant to the Inspector
General Act of 1978, as amended, and Section 209 of the Foreign Service Act of 1980, as
amended. It is one of a series of audit, inspection, investigative, and special reports prepared by
OIG periodically as part of its responsibility to promote effective management, accountability
and positive change in the Department of State and the Broadcasting Board of Governo
Source: Cabinet (Spring; exact date uncertain)
May 1, 2009
Anxiety about deception runs deep in the philosophical and religious traditions of Europe, and new techniques for mastering this fear mark episodes in the history of the modern world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, both the playfulness and the peril of deceit came to be distanced from the sphere of rational inquiry: the sciences ceased to have much use for legerdemain; metaphysicians lost interest in the theater. But it was not always so, as the conversation below with Anthony Grafto
Source: U. of Penn. website (Click here to watch video.)
May 1, 2009
When Steven Hahn, the Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History, visited the New York Historical Society’s exhibit, Slavery in New York, several years ago, he was surprised by how surprised visitors were to discover New York’s long involvement with slavery. “Most were simply stunned,” he recounts in his new book, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. They never knew how deeply embedded slavery was in the North and that it remained a national—not just Southern—instituti
Source: Commentary
May 1, 2009
Rarely in modern history have nations faced genuine existential threats. Wars are waged to change regimes, alter borders, acquire resources, and impose ideologies, but almost never to eliminate another state and its people. This was certainly the case during World War II, in which the Allies sought to achieve the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan and to oust their odious leaders, but never to destroy the German and Japanese states or to annihilate their populations. In the infrequent
Source: Democracy Now
May 1, 2009
This week, President Obama said waterboarding is torture but gave no indication he is planning to hold anyone accountable for authorizing it. We speak with University of Wisconsin professor, Alfred McCoy, author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror. [includes rush transcript]
AMY GOODMAN: Juan, our final topic today is the issue of torture.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. Well, sixty-two people were arrested Thursday outside the White
Source: Jay Parini in the Atlantic
May 1, 2009
ONE SEEDY BAR on a side street in Key West advertised its wares on a scrawled sign: LIVE GIRLS UPSTAIRS. Beats the alternative, I suppose.
With its invariable August weather and (usually more discreet) invitations to decadence, this tiny island—the southernmost point of the continental United States—has lured countless writers over the years. Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop lived there, and their houses still attract tourists. (Hemingway had the best house
Source: Press Release--Miami University (Ohio)
Apr 30, 2009
“To Everything There is a Season,” written and recorded by Pete Seeger in 1962, is one of the most recognizable songs in American music history.
In time for Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday, Miami University Distinguished Professor of History Allan M. Winkler has written To Everything There is a Season: Pete Seeger and the Power of Song. Winkler uses Seeger’s life and music as a frame of reference to discuss the important role popular music played during the various protest movements in
