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: Bill Moyers Journal on PBS
Mar 13, 2009
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the JOURNAL. Karen Armstrong's life, as you will soon learn, was turned around by of all things, a footnote. When this former nun fled the convent and became a scholar of literature at Oxford, she thought she'd put all things theological well behind her. But, as the saying goes, if you want to make God laugh, tell Him, or Her, your plans.
KAREN ARMSTRONG: So can I ask you what you think about the Pope?
BILL MOYERS: Next thing you know, Armstrong
Source: http://www.newswise.com
Mar 13, 2009
Economic historian Robert Whaples says he and the “vast, vast majority” of his peers are more optimistic about the future than a recent poll found average Americans to be.
Whaples, who is department chair and professor of economics at Wake Forest University, even says he has come to see the field of economics not as the so-called "dismal science" but rather as the "cheerful science."
With daily headlines focused on unemployment figures, sluggish cons
Source: http://www.international.ucla.edu
Mar 13, 2009
Visiting professor Jurgen Kocka, a modern social historian at the Free University of Berlin, gave a lecture that kicks off more than a year of talks, conferences and film screenings organized by the Center for European and Eurasian Studies. An international conference about 1989's events and a film series are set for November.
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BEFORE AN AUDIENCE that included consular officials from six Central and Eastern European countries that threw off Communism in 1989, a visit
Source: HNN Staff summary of a long article in the Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 13, 2009
The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports that historian Norman Golb has confirmed that his son used a pseudonym when defending Golb's Dead Sea Scrolls scholarship.
The son, Raphael H. Golb, has been charged in New York City with impersonation for allegedly assuming the identity of a scholar in order to discredit him. In an email that was widely distributed the scholar supposedly confesses to plagiarism. The scholar is a longtime critic of Norman Golb's theories about the disputed autho
Source: E.J. Dionne in the American Prospect
Mar 13, 2009
Last October, after the economy's downward spiral became obvious, I closed an e-mail to a friend with the words: "I never thought my obsession with the 1930s would ever be relevant to my life." That obsession had many roots, not the least being that my hometown of Fall River, Massachusetts, was a '30s kind of place with a '30s kind of culture, a '30s kind of economy, and '30s-style New Deal politics. But if there is a single person who inspired my fascination with an era, it is the his
Source: James Traug in the NYT Bk Rev
Mar 12, 2009
Had the White House aides who scripted Barack Obama’s remarks to Al Arabiya television in January consulted Rashid Khalidi’s latest work beforehand, the president might not have so blithely vowed to restore the “respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years ago.” In “Sowing Crisis,” Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair of Arab studies at Columbia and is a major pro-Palestinian voice in American scholarship, argues that Washington’s drive for heg
Source: NYT op ed by Frederick Kagan, Kimberly Kagan and Max Boot
Mar 12, 2009
“DONT worry, we are not going to lose this war.”
These were the parting words to us from Brig. Gen. Sher Muhammad Zazai, commander of the 205th Corps of the Afghan National Army in Kandahar. He was echoing the sentiments of a group of village elders we had met days before in Khost Province, who assured us that they would never allow the Taliban to come back.
It is odd that the Afghans felt it necessary to reassure American visitors that all was far from lost. It reflect
Source: Houston Chronicle
Mar 12, 2009
Priscilla Benham, a college professor who made Texas history come alive for generations of students, died Monday. She was 70.
“We’d take East Texas trips and stop by all the historical markers and historical houses. Wherever we went, it seemed something had to be historical,” recalled her son David Benham, a Houston golf pro. “I started calling them ‘hysterical markers.’ That was really the wrong thing to do.”
Benham, a descendant of Ulysses S. Grant who grew up in Bayt
Source: Michael Honey
Mar 12, 2009
[Michael Honey is Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma, and author of “Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign.]
One hundred historians have declared their support for the Employee Free Choice Act, introduced into Congress on March 10 by Senator Tom Harkin and Rep. George Miller.
The legislation would make it easier for workers to organize unions and harder for employers to evade them. Wo
Source: Harper's
Mar 10, 2009
Juan Cole is one of the nation’s leading historians focusing on the Middle East. Over the past decade he has emerged as a commentator on Middle East policy and a reliable source for new ideas that may enable the United States to pursue its foreign policy objectives more effectively in the region. For millions, his frequent posts at the Informed Comment blog provide a daily update on press accounts from the Islamic world, often including translations from Arabic- and Farsi-language sources in clo
Source: AP
Mar 10, 2009
Historian and Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust has won a $50,000 prize from the New York Historical Society for "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War."
Faust, 61, received the fourth annual American History Book Prize, the society announced Tuesday. She has written several other books about the Civil War and the South, including "Mothers of Invention" and "A Sacred Circle."
Related Links
Source: AHA Blog
Mar 10, 2009
To implement a resolution passed at the 2009 annual meeting, the AHA Council has formed a working group to create a threaded miniconference, which will explore historical perspectives on same-sex marriage at the 2010 meeting in San Diego. The working group includes Kristin Hoganson (Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) representing the 2010 Program Committee, Leisa Meyer (William and Mary Coll.) as co-chair of the AHA’s LGBTQ Task Force, and James Green (Brown Univ.), as well as the AHA vice p
Source: Chicago Tribune
Mar 10, 2009
Allen G. Debus, who introduced the history of science and medicine to the curriculum at the University of Chicago, was a widely known scholar of Renaissance alchemists and their first, halting steps toward treating illness.
Dr. Debus, 82, died of cardiac arrest Friday, March 6, in his Deerfield home, said his wife, Brunilda López Debus. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer six years ago but remained productive, particularly in pursuit of his hobby, vaudeville and early 20th Centur
Source: Canadian Press
Mar 9, 2009
British historian Lawrence Freedman has won the Lionel Gelber Prize for his book on the Middle East.
Now into its 19th year, the $15,000 prize honours books on international affairs. It was established by Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber.
Freedman's book is called "A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East" and is published by Doubleday Canada.
"If you were to select only one book to understand the turmoil and confusion of events
Source: David S. Wyman Institute
Mar 9, 2009
The controversy over the refusal of a Polish museum to return paintings created by a Holocaust survivor has entered a surprising new arena: the world of comic books.
Legendary comic book artist Neal Adams has teamed up with Holocaust historian Dr. Rafael Medoff to create “The Last Outrage,” a comic strip about Mrs. Dina Babbitt, a California resident who has been fighting for return of seven portraits that she was forced to paint in Auschwitz, by the notorious “Angel of Death,” Dr.
Source: Richard Pachter in the Miami Herald
Mar 9, 2009
Author Edwin Black is a child of Holocaust survivors. When he first saw an IBM card-sorting machine as part of an exhibit at the United States Holocaust Museum, he vowed to learn more about this machine and the role of its manufacturer. The result was 2001's IBM and the Holocaust, a devastating account of the venerated American firm's hand-in-hand collaboration with Adolf Hitler's Nazi government in identifying, organizing and exterminating Jews and others who were deemed non-Aryan and undesirab
Source: Daniel Pipes website
Mar 8, 2009
I prepared for this interview on the Fox New Channel armed with quotes expecting to discuss specifics of the coverage of Islam in select U.S. textbook. Only when the program was already underway did I learn that there would be another interviewee with me and that it would be Hussein Ibish.Ibish twice dismissed the Muslims who support terrorism as a"tiny speck." I disputed that on air but, having prepped to discuss textbooks, was not equipped with specific figures and citations.H
Source: Meet the Press
Mar 8, 2009
[Liaquat Ahamed is the author of Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World.]
DAVID GREGORY: Liaquat, I want to start with you. The book"Lords of Finance," how central bankers in the run-up to the Great Depression got it wrong, is widely read around Washington. And in the epilogue you write this:"Anyone who writes or thinks about the Great Depression cannot avoid the question: Could it happen again?" That's the big question now.
MR. LIAQUAT AHAMED: Well, it coul
Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Mar 8, 2009
Keith Nolan was 43 when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He didn't smoke. Not regularly, anyway. He might have a cigarette now and then when he was drinking, but essentially, he was a nonsmoker. The doctors told him the cancer was probably genetic. His father had survived throat cancer and tongue cancer.
Nolan was living in the basement of his father's house when I visited him in January 2008. "The doctors say I have a year left," Nolan told me. The doctors were off by a
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 8, 2009
Two years after it was published to great acclaim, Andrew Marr's bestseller A History of Modern Britain has been urgently recalled from bookshops amid great mystery.
"I am afraid I have agreed not to say a word about it," the amiable television presenter tells Mandrake.
Pan Macmillan has issued an "urgent" stock recall notice in which it said that shops needed to return all unsold copies immediately for unspecified "legal reasons".
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