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: Op ed in the NYT by Philip Zelikow, a professor of history at the University of Virginia, was the counselor of the State Department from 2005 to 2006 and the executive director of the 9/11 commission.
Apr 23, 2009
The C.I.A. program did generate a huge volume of intelligence material. Many of these interrogation reports did contain valuable information. After all, the C.I.A. had exclusive custody of many of the most important Qaeda captives for years. Any of the flow from that river would be theirs. Agency officials thus wrote memos recounting plots prevented and people captured.
Yet the C.I.A.’s claims that its methods produced actionable information can also be misleading. Former Vice Presi
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandbox
Apr 23, 2009
The New York Post features an article by Jacob Gershman on the Joseph Massad tenure case at Columbia. I highly recommend it. Gershman covered this story for the now-defunct New York Sun, and he knows all the ins and outs.
Gershman reports that Massad's file has already passed muster with President Lee Bollinger, and will be presented to Columbia's Board of Trustees for a final decision in about a week. Bollinger "buckled," Gershman writes, rather than face down a determin
Source: http://www.christianitytoday.com
Apr 22, 2009
Ronald C. White Jr., a Huntington Library fellow and a visiting professor of history at UCLA, is the author of the bestselling books Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year) and The Eloquent President: A Portrait of Lincoln Through His Words. His latest book A. Lincoln: A Biography (2009) has been a New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times bestseller and a History Book Club selection. He is in high demand as a speaker, especially a
Source: NYT
Apr 22, 2009
Stefan Brecht, whose father was the playwright Bertolt Brecht and who added to the family’s theatrical legacy by fastidiously chronicling the rise of avant-garde theater, died on April 13 in Manhattan. He was 84.
The cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Rena Gill. Her husband had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease, she said.
For decades, Mr. Brecht worked on a series of books, collectively known as “The Original Theater of the City of New York: From the
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Apr 22, 2009
As digital archives have become more important and more popular, there are varying schools of thought among scholars about how best to guarantee that they will be around for good. Some think that the best possibility is for the creators of the archives -- people generally with some passion for the topic -- to keep control. Others favor acquisition, thinking that larger entities provide more security and resources for the long run.
The fate of"Paper of Record," a digital archive of early n
Source: Politico.com
Apr 21, 2009
A Hebrew-speaking reader sends over a report in Maariv that the historian Michael Oren is the frontrunner to be that country's ambassador to Washington.
It's an interesting choice -- he's written a couple of histories of the Middle East that were bestsellers in this country, the most recent of which covered ... U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
Source: Press Release
Apr 21, 2009
College faculty and administrators are invited to participate in the ninth annual “Reacting to the Past” Institute at Barnard College (New York), June 11-14, 2009. Featured tracks:
“The Threshold of Democracy: Athens in 403 B.C.”
“Greenwich Village, 1913: Suffrage, Labor and the New Woman”
“Charles Darwin, the Copley Medal, and the Rise of Naturalism, 1862-64”
“The Josianic Reform: Deuteronomy, Prophecy, and Israelite Religion, 622 BCE”
“
Source: Politico.com
Apr 21, 2009
There aren’t any sex scenes or vampires, and it won’t help you lose weight.
But House Republicans are tearing through the pages of Amity Shlaes’ “The Forgotten Man” like soccer moms before book club night.
Shlaes’ 2007 take on the Great Depression questions the success of the New Deal and takes issue with the value of government intervention in a major economic crisis — red meat for a party hungry for empirical evidence that the Democrats’ spending plans won’t end the c
Source: Barry Rubin at his blog at GLORIA
Apr 20, 2009
A friend of mine is an expert on education. We were in his apartment in New York maybe 6-8 years ago. He said: the schools are so bad that I bet my son doesn't even know about George Washington. He called in his 12 year old son and asked what he knew about George Washington. His son said--no kidding, "George Washington Carver?"
In subsequent discussion, he couldn't tell us anything about the American revolution, the Constitution, or the Federalist papers. And he was a smar
Source: http://www.pulitzer.org
Apr 20, 2009
History - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed (W.W. Norton & Company)
Biography - American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House by Jon Meacham (Random House)
General Nonfiction - Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas A. Blackmon (Doubleday)
Ralph Luker at HNN Blog Cliopatria
Congrat
Source: Jonathan Schanzer at Campus Watch
Apr 19, 2009
[The writer, an adjunct scholar at www.Campus-Watch.org, is director of policy for the Jewish Policy Center and author of Hamas vs. Fatah: The Struggle for Palestine (Palgrave). JPC intern Samara Greenberg contributed to this article.]
Rashid Khalidi, the former PLO spokesman-turned Columbia University professor, is convinced that Israel has constructed a "matrix of control" in the Middle East. Khalidi once cited books and articles
Source: National Journal (subscribers only)
Apr 18, 2009
An unusual revolt by State Department employees is expected to trigger the ouster of the bureaucrat heading the Office of the Historian, a unique squad of 35 academics charged by statute with impartially chronicling America's foreign relations.
State Department Historian Marc Susser and his aide Douglas Kraft will be removed and offered other civil service positions, based on a recommendation by State's inspector general's office that will be finalized and published in the next two
Source: John Gray in the Guardian
Apr 18, 2009
During the Soviet era it used to be joked that Russia was the only country in which the past was unpredictable. When the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria was shot in 1953, libraries were ordered to cut out the pages of the Soviet encyclopedia that dealt with him and expand the section on the Bering Strait. As far as official Soviet history was concerned Beria had never existed and the events in which he had played a part had to be rewritten.
In the former Soviet Union history was
Source: http://www.pjstar.com
Apr 18, 2009
Carl Adams is feeling vindicated these days. As an amateur historian who's followed Abraham Lincoln's career as a lawyer in Illinois since the mid-1990s, Adams has made a point of researching a case that originated in Pekin involving slavery.
But other historians didn't think the little-known case that came before the Illinois Supreme Court in 1841 was all that significant, said Adams, referring to reactions to a presentation he made 10 years ago.
But Adams got a differ
Source: NYT
Apr 18, 2009
NOW that colleges have created gender-neutral housing and bathrooms, and gay couples can be married in Iowa and Connecticut, it may be hard to understand the uproar that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work caused when it first appeared in the mid-1980s.
Ms. Sedgwick, who died of breast cancer last week at age 58, found subterranean homoerotic impulses in the work of Henry James, Friedrich Nietzsche and Charles Dickens. In the decorous novels of Jane Austen, she unearthed hidden references
Source: NYT
Apr 18, 2009
Samuel H. Beer, a leading American expert on British government and politics who was a longtime professor of government at Harvard and who led the liberal organization Americans for Democratic Action from 1959 to 1962, died April 7 at his home in Washington. He was 97 and lived in Washington and Cambridge, Mass.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Jane K. Brooks. For 30 years, Mr. Beer taught “Western Thought and Institutions,” a legendary course that combined history, political t
Source: Ruth Rosen at her blog at TPMCafe
Apr 17, 2009
The memos about torture released by the Obama administration are horrifying to read. Nothing new, here, but they are like a punch in the stomach all over again. This is my country? This is the nation that stands for freedom and decency?
I understand why President Obama doesn't want to prosecute those who believed they were acting under laws written by the Office of Legal Counsel. But that is not the only policy he and other Democrats can pursue.
First, the men who wrote
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 17, 2009
Six years ago this month, the National Museum of Iraq was extensively looted amid the chaos of the U.S. invasion of Baghdad. Among the stolen objects was the Mask of Warka, a 5,100-year-old Sumerian artifact that is believed to be one of the earliest surviving representations of a human face. The mask was found buried on an Iraqi farm five months later — but thousands of other precious objects were destroyed or disappeared into the black market.
"We do not know, and we may neve
Source: Jeff Biggers at Huffington Post
Apr 17, 2009
The National Trust for Historic Preservation has just posted a Blair Mountain Battlefield petition, which calls on the state of West Virginia and private property owners to keep the site of one of the most important and historic American labor conflicts on the National Register.
Why is Blair Mountain important today?
Threatened by possible mountaintop removal strip mining operations, Blair Mountain is the historic site of the largest armed insurrection since the Civil W
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Apr 17, 2009
Dr David Starkey, the historian, has compared a proposal to build a 'zero-carbon house' near the remains of Richmond Palace to a "snotty-nosed punk in an elegant drawing room".
On Thursday planners at Richmond council approved construction of the solar powered, triple-glazed, two-storey house near the site of the palace, which was built by Henry VIII’s father Henry VII.
Henry VIII courted Anne Boleyn there and spent Christmases there, as did their daughter E
