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: http://www.upenn.edu/gazette
Apr 30, 2009
The sky on this mid-January day is opaque, the color of gauze, and large snowflakes are falling. From time to time, a wind slashes, but for two hours of walking, Tom Sugrue, the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, and I have ignored it.
We had met at a buzzing Mount Airy café, InFusion, whose back room was given over to young parents and small children. Sugrue, who lives nearby in a grand, wood-paneled house with a thick garden, is 46. He has a round, bo
Source: Guardian
Apr 30, 2009
Schools are producing illiterate and uncommunicative children, he tells conference of private school heads.
The TV historian David Starkey today called for schools to bring back memorising dates, elocution and grammar lessons, and public-speaking competitions.
The 64-year-old expert on the Tudor period said education had been "taken over by bean counters" and schools were producing illiterate and uncommunicative children.
He said that in the early
Source: http://grad-schools.usnews
Apr 30, 2009
It's a four-way tie for #1:
Princeton
Stanford
Berkeley
Yale
#5
Harvard
Chicago
Source: Columbia Spectator
Apr 30, 2009
One day, Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust missed a call from Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley.
“He said he had good news,” Faust recalled. “I said I could use some good news.” So she e-mailed Brinkley, asking him to call her.
Brinkley telephoned Faust late that night to inform her that she had won a Bancroft Prize for her latest book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, published in 2008.
The Bancroft Prize, bestowed an
Source: Ben Macintyre (Author of A Foreign Field: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in the Great War) in the Times (UK)
Apr 29, 2009
[Ben Macintyre thought he knew who condemned a fugitive British soldier to death in France in 1916, and wrote a book about it. Now, ten years later, an e-mail out of the blue has convinced him that he had the wrong man. Here, he sets the record straight.]
###
History never stands still. Just when we think we understand the past, it moves on. Ten years ago, I set out to try to solve a murder mystery left over from the First World War. Two years later, thinking that I had
Source: NJ Star-Ledger
Apr 29, 2009
If it takes at least 50 years to fully appraise history, as historian and author David McCullough told a classroom of Drew University students this morning, then using the first 100 days of a presidency as a benchmark for performance is futile.
But even as McCullough, speaking on the 100th day of President Barack Obama's term in office, called the 100-day assessment "contrived," he had high praise for the commander-in-chief.
"I think we have an extraordin
Source: http://www.journalism.co.uk
Apr 29, 2009
British historian Simon Schama has joined the Financial Times and Financial Times Weekend as contributing editor.
Schama, professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, New York will write for the papers regularly, on a wide range of topics.
"I am delighted that Simon Schama is joining the Financial Times. He is one of the most elegant and versatile writers in the English language, a master historian who can turn his talents to the arts, popular cultu
Source: Oxford University Press blog
Apr 29, 2009
It is not everyday you get two Lincoln Prize winners together to ask each other questions, but lucky us, we had that very honor. Below is a conversation between James M. McPherson, most recently the author of
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Apr 28, 2009
Larry Kramer returned to Yale University -- the alma mater with which the gay activist and author has had a stormy relationship -- and offered a harsh critique of the university's commitment to gay studies and of the idea that the discipline should be linked to gender and sexuality studies. Because ties of the sort that exist at Yale between gay studies and gender studies are in fact common in academe, the speech -- posted online by The Daily Beast -- is attracting discussion.
Krame
Source: Jamie Glazov interviews Hanson at frontpagemag.com
Apr 27, 2009
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
FP: Victor Davis Hanson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
What report card would you give the Obama administration in terms of foreign policy right now? Why?
Hanson: An Incomplete that at the present rate will turn into a D/F if he is not careful.
Obama has confused a number of issues: intractable problems like North Korea, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, C
Source: Martin Kramer at Sandbox, his blog
Apr 26, 2009
It's now up to Columbia's trustees to say what all the world south of 116th Street knows perfectly well: Joseph Massad does Columbia no credit. (For my past Massad writings, see the right sidebar.) Back in 2005, Columbia's faculty radicals, anticipating this moment, wrote a statement in favor of academic freedom, in which they tried to invalidate the statutory authority of the
Source: Scotsman
Apr 25, 2009
A LEADING historian was under pressure to apologise yesterday after he described Scotland as a "feeble little nation".
David Starkey also hit out at Robert Burns, describing him as a "boring provincial poet", and dismissed bagpipes as "awful" on BBC's Question Time.
The outburst provoked 72 complaints to the BBC and the show's website has been inundated with comments from angry viewers.
Professor Robert Crawford, of St Andrews
Source: Deborah Lipstadt blog
Apr 25, 2009
Check out this article in today's Varietyand the blog, Cinematical.As the Variety article notes, the producers of the Soloist have teamed up with Participation Media to make the film. Participation, established by
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 24, 2009
To Willeke Wenderish, an associate professor of Egyptian archaeology at the University of California at Los Angeles, exploring the ruins of an ancient temple within an air-conditioned computer classroom can be even more useful than visiting the site in person.
Ms. Wenderish recently co-produced a virtual-reality project called “Digital Karnak,” which allows students (and visitors to the project’s Web site) to learn how the Egyptian religious center has evolved over two millennia. Mi
Source: NYT
Apr 24, 2009
If you wanted a book title to speed the pulse of liberal academics, journalists and politicians, you couldn’t do much better than “The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right.” For many people that’s a title akin to “The Winning Ways of Serial Killers.”
The two leading arguments of the book, written by Jon A. Shields and published last month by Princeton University Press, are no less provocative.
“Many Christian-right organizations,” Mr. Shields writes, “have helped c
Source: NYT
Apr 24, 2009
Walter Schneir, whose fascination with the Rosenberg espionage case began with a hotly debated 1965 book arguing that the couple had been framed, and ended with his grim acceptance that Julius, if not Ethel, Rosenberg was indeed a Soviet spy, died April 11 at his home in Pleasantville, N.Y. He was 81.
The cause was thyroid cancer, said his wife, Miriam, who was the co-author of the book....
The picture began to change with the publication in 1983 of “The Rosenberg File:
Source: NYT
Apr 24, 2009
Michael Burleigh’s ambitious cultural history of terrorism is indeed suffused with blood and rage. The blood is provided in graphic, detailed, often nauseating descriptions of the vicious brutality of terrorists ranging from the Irish Fenians to Al Qaeda. The rage, on the other hand, is in the pen of the author, and it is equally wide ranging. Burleigh rages against terrorists and all their apologists: “unserious” academics, ineffably polite interrogators, colluding human rights lawyers and thos
Source: AP
Apr 24, 2009
North and South, black and white, history buffs like the Doyles and educators - some 2,000 people in all - are expected to attend the daylong gathering at the University of Richmond, where the leading Civil War historians won't exactly rewrite history. But they do promise new scrutiny of a war whose causes have long since been reduced to bumper sticker slogans.
Conference organizers said overwhelming public interest in the conference underscores a national hunger to better grasp the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 24, 2009
It sounds like a scene out of Possession: In the waning hours of a research trip to the British Library, an American scholar stumbles on a cache of letters overlooked for 250 years. It's the stuff of scholarly romance, and it happened to Alan Houston, a professor of political science at the University of California at San Diego, who made what he describes as the find of a lifetime—47 letters written by, to, and about Benjamin Franklin, and never before seen by scholars.
Mr. Houston
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 24, 2009
“While acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged,” wrote Jared M. Diamond in an essay in The New Yorker last April.
Now two of the subjects of that essay are acknowledging their own vengeful feelings. This week a lawyer filed a $10-million defamation claim in a New York court on behalf of two Papua New Guinea men whom Mr. Diamond described as active participants in clan warfare during the 1990s.
