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: Columbia Spectator
Apr 9, 2009
Reported rumors have spread that Middle East and Asian languages and cultures professor Joseph Massad will be granted tenure.
Yet despite the chatter, most notably reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education on Wednesday, the outcome of the controversial Palestinian scholar’s tenure process remains to be seen and the review has not concluded. The Chronicle’s blog stated that a “professor in the department who did not want to be named said word on the grapevine within the department is t
Source: Kimberly Kagan and Frederick W. Kagan in the WSJ
Apr 9, 2009
... On a visit to Iraq last month, we had the opportunity to see the transformation firsthand. Iraq is now a fully sovereign country. U.S. Commander Gen. Ray Odierno has insisted on the most rigorous implementation of the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement, which gives Iraqi authorities greater responsibility than ever before. U.S. forces now detain Iraqis only after securing arrest warrants from Iraqi judges, and they are releasing or transferring to Iraqi custody all of the detainees they now hold.
Source: Press Release--Emory University
Apr 7, 2009
Holocaust Denial on Trial (HDOT.org), a Web site founded by Emory University professor Deborah Lipstadt to teach about the dangers of Holocaust denial and demonstrate how deniers distort historical evidence of the Holocaust, is re-launching in four new languages: Arabic, Farsi, Russian and Turkish. These translations are designed to spread the original site's messages to areas where Holocaust denial goes the most unchallenged.
HDOT.org was founded following the well-known David Irvi
Source: USA Today
Apr 7, 2009
Barack Obama "is our first global president," according to historian Douglas Brinkley.
"Obama came of age, really, after the Cold War, with the Internet being the transformative engine of society, and he now takes his multicultural heritage and the geographical diversity of his upbringing" to the world, Brinkley said in an interview Tuesday as Obama wrapped up his first trip abroad.
Brinkley, who has written about presidents from Teddy Roosevelt to Ronald
Source: CNN
Apr 7, 2009
Hold on to the audacity of hope but shun the arrogance of over-promising.
That's the message from a scholar who says President Obama can learn much from the success and mistakes of another ambitious attempt to remake America.
Robert Weisbrot, co-author of "The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s,'' says the Great Society revolution was "tremendously liberating" for members of the most vulnerable groups in America.
Source: WaPo
Apr 7, 2009
Steven Lee Carson, 66, a former archivist and editor who became a historian and lecturer on presidential history, notably as an authority on the life of President Abraham Lincoln, died March 27 at his home in Silver Spring after a heart attack.
During the past few years, he was a presidential historian at the Woodrow Wilson House. He spent his early career at the National Archives as well as writing for and editing the Manuscript Society News and other publications aimed at libraria
Source: Free Press
Apr 6, 2009
Michigan has thousands of university professors who are erudite scholars with impressive credentials, big ideas and, in many cases, decent contracts for books or consulting. Yet almost none of them ever penetrate public consciousness and become well known outside of academia.
One prof who came close to becoming a public personality was Sidney Fine, the University of Michigan history professor who died last Tuesday in Ann Arbor. He was 88.
Fine was famous for several rea
Source: CBCNews
Apr 6, 2009
J.M.S. Careless, the Canadian historian who wrote seminal works on George Brown, urban history and a changing Canada, has died. He was 90.
Careless died Monday at Toronto's Sunnybrook Hospital, according to his son, James Careless.
Careless won two Governor-General's Awards for his books of history — one for Brown of the Globe, a two-volume portrait of one of the Fathers of Confederation, and Canada: A Story of Challenge, which became a standard one-volume history of Ca
Source: St. Petersburg Times -- politifact.com
Apr 5, 2009
In August 1963, when Raymond Arsenault was 15, his family was staying in a hotel during a move to Florida. • At the swimming pool, young Arsenault met some people who were on the way to what they told the teen would be a historic event the next day: the March on Washington for civil rights.
He was fired with the desire to witness it himself. "I told my family, 'We can't drive to Florida tomorrow,' " Arsenault says. "In the Hollywood version, we wouldn't have."
Source: NYT
Apr 5, 2009
Last Thursday, a jury in Denver ruled that the termination of activist-teacher Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado had been wrongful (a term of art) even though a committee of his faculty peers had found him guilty of a variety of sins.
The verdict did not surprise me because I had read the committee’s report and found it less an indictment of Churchill than an example of a perfectly ordinary squabble about research methods and the handling of evidence. The accusations that
Source: Steve Plaut in Middle East Quarterly, Spring, 2009 (the version above is longer)
Apr 5, 2009
[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.]
Ilan Pappe is probably the most widely known Israeli seeking the annihilation of his own country. He currently on the faculty of the University
Source: Natasha Proietto at TheCommentFactory
Apr 4, 2009
[Natasha is a British historian and writer living in Switzerland. She graduated from Oxford with a degree in History and German and has a Masters in Russian with International Relations from UCL.]
David Starkey’s recent pronouncements on female historians, which I came across on April 1st, did at first seem to be a bad joke. Apparently, history, especially that of Tudor times, has been feminized by waves of women analysts focusing on Henry VIII’s love life at the expense of the real
Source: Inside Vandy
Apr 2, 2009
Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs Richard McCarty maintains his support for Vanderbilt's decision to honor historian Doris Kearns Goodwin in spite of criticism from students.
Goodwin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and well-known historian, is the recipient of the 2009 Nichols-Chancellor's Medal and will be the keynote speaker on Senior Class Day. Goodwin was also the center of a plagiarism scandal.
"I have looked into this very carefully and I've s
Source: The University of Chicago Chronicle
Apr 2, 2009
University faculty and leading scholars from across the nation will gather Friday, April 17 and Saturday, April 18 at the Law School for a conference on the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment, to debate the meaning of liberty, rights, oppression and race. Adopted in 1865, the 13th Amendment prohibits slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
“Slavery, Abolition and Human Rights: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Thirteenth Amendment” is a two-day confe
Source: LAT
Apr 2, 2009
[Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. The paperback edition of his book, "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism," comes out.]
When he visits Strasbourg, France, this week to participate in festivities marking NATO's 60th anniversary, President Obama should deliver a valedictory address, announcing his intention to withdraw the United States from the alliance. The U.S. has done its job. It's time fo
Source: Times (UK)
Apr 2, 2009
A towering scholar among medievalists, George Kane was for half a century and more the acknowledged authority on Piers Plowman. He spent most of his career in the University of London, where he was an influential and greatly respected figure. After retiring from King’s College, he accepted a chair in the University of North Carolina, retiring in 1987.
His first London appointment was as an assistant lecturer at University College in 1946, where he became a lecturer with tenure in 1
Source: Evan R. Goldstein in Foreign Policy
Apr 1, 2009
On an overcast afternoon in early April, unsmiling men with big guns and earpieces patrol the sidewalk in front of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's private residence in the upscale Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia. A short walk up the road on Azza Street, Benny Morris sits outside a cafe, radiating despair. "Iran is building atomic weapons at least in part -- maybe in large part -- because it intends to use them. The people there are religious fanatics," he says in a rapid
Source: Jesse Lemisch in a letter to the editor of Perspectives, the AHA magazine
Apr 1, 2009
To the Editor:
David M. Darlington writes, “The 1968 [AHA] annual meeting was moved from Chicago to New York City in protest of the police riot at the Democratic Convention that summer (“123 in 125: A Brief History of AHA Annual Meetings,” Perspectives in History, March 2009). Not really. The AHA was so ardent about guarding what it presented as its political neutrality that it described the change of venue as a matter of convenience, and definitely not protest. Mayor Richard Daley’
Source: Perspectives (AHA mag.)
Apr 1, 2009
Over the past year the American public has come dangerously close to losing the battle for a full and honest historical record of our foreign relations. Bureaucratic mismanagement within the State Department’s Office of the Historian threatened—and continues to threaten—to damage severely the documentary series, The Foreign Relations of the United States, which has been in continuous publication since 1861 and is considered the gold standard for diplomatic documentation (for a brief early discus
Source: http://www.cibmagazine.com
Apr 1, 2009
Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s ambitious new work, Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments presents a chronicle of Shanghai’s interactions with the outside world through a series of 25-year snapshots in time.
CIB caught up with the University of California-Irvine professor at the Shanghai Literary Festival last month to discover more about his methodology and hear his views on the past, present and future of China’s largest city.
When did you start researching the bo
