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: Foreign Policy (March/April issue)
Mar 1, 2009
When Samuel P. Huntington and Warren Demian Manshel cofounded Foreign Policy in 1970, their explicit goal was to attack entrenched orthodoxies in the Washington debate. They promised a journal that would be “serious but not scholarly, lively but not glib, and critical without being negative.”
Huntington passed away on December 24, grandly and rightly praised as one of the world’s most influential thinkers. His long career as an intellectual impresario was less well known: With his f
Source: DPA
Feb 28, 2009
Right-wing British historian David Irving confirmed yesterday that he had offered his assistance to controversial bishop Richard Williamson but said he did not believe the cleric’s apology over his Holocaust-denial remarks would “help” him.
Irving, contacted by Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa yesterday, said he had offered Williamson to stay with him at his home in Windsor, near London, following his expulsion from Argentina this week. But the bishop had not been in touch since his retu
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 28, 2009
A small bazaar sprang up on the steps of Mission High on Thursday night as people passed out flyers and chatted up the crowds streaming in to see a sold-out show featuring historian Howard Zinn and a cavalcade of A-list actors and local figures.
The varied crew, featuring actors Kerry Washington, Josh Brolin, Diane Lane and Benjamin Bratt; hip-hop artist Boots Riley; activist Clarence Thomas; civil rights attorney Renee Maria Saucedo; musicians the Stairwell Sisters; and historian A
Source: NYT
Feb 28, 2009
WALL STREET was in good spirits on the morning of Sept. 16, 1920. The stock market was up, with oil and railroad shares doing particularly well. At lunchtime on this pleasantly warm day, hundreds of workers spilled into the streets, never suspecting the horror that was to come.
Just before the noon bell tolled at Trinity Church, a horse-drawn cart pulled up near J. P. Morgan’s headquarters at Broad and Wall Streets. The driver quickly dismounted and melted into the crowd. The wagon,
Source: NYT
Feb 28, 2009
[Niall Ferguson is a professor at Harvard and the author of “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World.”]
THIS recession, which began in December 2007, has already lasted longer than the average postwar recession. If it turns out to be as bad as the most protracted of the postwar downturns, we will touch bottom next month.
But my strong suspicion is that we are now in something more like a Great Recession. It won’t produce as steep a fall in American output
Source: Frederick J. Graboske at the website, http://www.watergate.com, run by Len Colodny
Feb 27, 2009
[HNN Editor: This article is by Mr. Graboske, the former Nixon tapes archivist at the National Archives, who was cited by the NYT recently as a tapes expert in an article assessing the accuracy of Stanley Kutler's Watergate transcripts. Graboske is a longtime critic of the mainstream media's Watergate narrative endorsed by Stanley Kutler. When Silent Coup, the controversial history of Watergate that claimed John Dean was behind the conspiracy, appeared in 1992 Graboske
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Feb 27, 2009
If you have any interest in African American history, the history of American race relations, or the civil rights movement, I recommend that you read Robert J. Norrell's"Reshaping the Image of Booker T. Washington," CHE, 27 February.* It is an apologia for his new biography, Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington, which seeks to frame the story of BTW's leadership in positive terms. In
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 27, 2009
When the Union Army's 154th New York Volunteer Infantry disbanded, in 1865, its commanding colonel, Lewis D. Warner, gave a farewell speech that extolled the regiment's cohesion and solidarity. "I would not exchange my three years' connection with this little band," he said, "for all the rest of my life together."
The "connection with this little band" is an eternal theme of warfare. Now such intense, life-changing bonds — the stuff of epic poetry and s
Source: Robert J. Norrell in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 27, 2009
[Robert J. Norrell is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and author of Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Harvard University Press, 2009).]
Any scholar taking on a well-studied topic approaches the existing literature with some trepidation. But anxiety turns into fear when you become convinced that the main line of interpretation is seriously in error — as I discovered while writing a revisionist biography of Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tu
Source: Mills Kelly at edwire.com
Feb 26, 2009
I am a Habsburg historian today because of something that happened on my first day as an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia back in the mid-1970s. Like many students brand new to higher education, I had no idea what courses I ought to choose for that first semester of college and UVa offered next to no advising assistance for new freshmen. So, I asked my Resident Advisor what he might recommend. He told me that under no circumstances should I take Western Civilization because it
Source: http://exchangeartist.com (date unknown)
Feb 26, 2009
[Jane Kamensky, a native of New York City, earned her B.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University. Since 1993, she has been a member of the History faculty of Brandeis University, where she teaches courses on early American history and culture, and on the writing of history. She has won two university-wide awards for excellence in teaching. ]
The Exchange Artist tells the story of Andrew Dexter, Junior and the first American skyscraper. Equal parts entrepreneur and confidence man, Dexter er
Source: http://www.theskanner.com
Feb 26, 2009
Of all the electronic resources available for anyone interested in Black history, www.BlackPast.org is the richest gold mine on the planet.
Developed by University of Washington history professor Dr. Quintard Taylor – the foremost historian of African Americans and African descendents in the West – BlackPast.org has attracted millions of visitors to its hundreds of free and easily-searched features since its launch in 2005.
“Our mi
Source: Editorial in http://english.chosun.com
Feb 26, 2009
In an interview with the Chosun Ilbo, Prof. Lee Tae-jin of Seoul National University, who is retiring from the Department of Korean History, said the account of modern and contemporary history in school texts by Kumsung Publishing went beyond the boundaries of school texts. Revising the words is not enough, he added: Korea’s history texts need to be rewritten. Some historians ended up supporting the left-leaning history text in statements protesting against the government’s calls to revi
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Feb 25, 2009
When David Horowitz named the "101 most dangerous academics in America," in The Professors, a book in 2006, Bettina Aptheker was among those featured. A professor of feminist studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Aptheker was critiqued this way in the book:
"Aptheker describes her teaching philosophy as a 'revolutionary praxis.' The crux of this approach, she has said, is to subvert the traditional mission of the university by breaking down the distin
Source: Cynthia Haven at the website of the Stanford News Service
Feb 25, 2009
When Freedom Summer was in full swing in 1964, a political cartoon in a Mississippi newspaper showed three Union soldiers from the Civil War era, one holding a noose. "We'll larn them Rebels some Civil Rights," it said.
The circumstances may be particular, but the phenomenon is international: A few years ago, as mass graves of atrocities were discovered, the Serbians said that corpses had been taken from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and reburied in the Balkans to discredi
Source: Email from Megan Friedel, Archivist at the Oregon Historical Society Research Library
Feb 25, 2009
It is with great sadness that I write to share the news with you that, due to severe budget reductions, the Oregon Historical Society will be closing its Research Library beginning this Saturday, February 28th. The collections will no longer be open to the public, and all library positions will be eliminated beginning March 13th. A few positions will remain to handle orders for photo and film reproduction. It is not known at this time if or when the library will re-open and at what capacity.
Source: Times (UK)
Feb 24, 2009
David Irving and Richard Williamson have been in regular email contact since the controversy blew up after the Pope lifted the excommunications. Another picture from the party and some details of the correspondence between these two men below. As we report, Williamson was due to be met at Heathrow at 7.15 tomorrow morning, when his flight from Buenos Aires gets in, by Michele Renouf and a team of lawyers. Read her interesting Wiki entry. Renouf was a speaker at the notorious Holocaust denial con
Source: News Hounds ("We watch FOX so you don't have to.")
Feb 24, 2009
The weekly Larry Schweikart show on Fox&Friends got even loonier last week (February 18th). In addition to presenting a rather confused and confusing “critique” of” liberal lies,” Schweikart and Doocy actually created their own myth – or dare I say, conservative lie. But before I get to the substance of the show, it should be mentioned that University of Dayton’s Professor Larry Schweikart is Rush Limbaugh approved. Rush says, regarding Larry’s book (“48 Liberal Lies”) which is pimped weekly
Source: USA Today
Feb 24, 2009
In February, Black History Month, publishers release a flood of books about or by African Americans. USA TODAY recommends a dozen new titles for all ages.
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $19.95, for ages 12 and up) by Phillip Hoose celebrates a little-known civil-rights pioneer who at 15 defied segregation on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., nearly a year before Rosa Parks would. Colvin, now a retired nurse in New York, gets to tell her own story, and the la
Source: AHA Blog
Feb 24, 2009
In 2009, George Mason University and the American Historical Association will offer the first Roy Rosenzweig Fellowship for Innovation in Digital History. This award was developed by friends and colleagues of Roy Rosenzweig (1950–2007), Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New Media at George Mason University, to honor his life and work as a pioneer in the field of digital history.
This nonresidential fellowship will be awarded annually to honor and support work on an inn
