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: Blogger Ashley Cruseturner (The Bosque Boys blog)
Feb 22, 2009
I am back from one of my favorite annual events: the 2009 meeting of the Texas Community College Teachers Association.
The history section featured an outstanding slate of eminent scholars: Eric Foner, David Goldfield, Brian Delay, and H.W. Brands. I hope to offer comment at some point on the incredibly provocative presentations offered by those luminaries.
However, as is my wont, I could not help myself from sneaking into the government section to hear one of my favo
Source: Clark Hoyt in the NYT
Feb 22, 2009
[Clark Hoyt is the Public Editor (ombudsman) of the NYT.]
WITH the movie “Frost/Nixon” reviving memories of Watergate, Times readers on a recent Sunday might have been expecting major revelations when they saw this front-page headline: “John Dean’s Watergate Role At Issue in Nixon Tapes Feud.”
Instead, they got an article reviving a decade-old argument over the editing of widely cited transcripts of the Watergate cover-up, as captured on Richard Nixon’s secret taping system.
Source: Montreal Gazette
Feb 21, 2009
Battle re-enactments similar to the Plains of Abraham event that was cancelled last week generally fail to teach people very much about history, one of Canada's leading historians says.
But a faithful recreation of the battle would at least have had the merit of drawing a sharp distinction between the way the French army fought versus the way the militiamen fought, says Desmond Morton of Montreal.
"The French army took to its heels, but the militia didn't," sa
Source: Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald
Feb 21, 2009
... Occasionally, one is privileged to live through a moment when history doesn't just open wide like a door on a hinge, but you know it for what it is even then, even as it it is happening, so you can fix the details in your mind, rehearse the stories you will tell your grandchildren someday. The night Barack Obama was elected president was one of those moments.
But what did that tell us about who we are, what we are, where we are on the road to racial reconciliation? What, indeed,
Source: Doug Ireland at the website of Gay City News
Feb 20, 2009
When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made his infamous claim at a September 2007 Columbia University appearance that ""In Iran, we don't have homosexuals like in your country," the world laughed at the absurdity of this pretense.
Now, a forthcoming book by a leading Iranian scholar in exile, which details both the long history of homosexuality in that nation and the origins of the campaign to erase its traces, not only provides a superlative reply to Ahmadinejad
Source: Independent (UK)
Feb 20, 2009
Victor Kiernan, professor emeritus of Modern History at Edinburgh University, was an erudite Marxist historian with wide-ranging interests that spanned virtually every continent. His passion for history and radical politics, classical languages and world literature was evenly divided.
His interest in languages was developed at home in south Manchester. His father worked for the Manchester Ship Canal as a translator of Spanish and Portuguese and young Victor picked these up even before get
Source: Press Release--Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Feb 20, 2009
The tenth annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, honoring the best new book on slavery or abolition, was awarded at the Yale Club in New York City on February 19. Stephanie Smallwood of the University of Washington, Seattle, won the prize for her book, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Harvard University Press). The prize is awarded by Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman
Source: Press Release--Washington College (MD)
Feb 20, 2009
CHESTERTOWN, FEB. 20, 2009 – In commemoration of George Washington’s birthday, Washington College today announced three finalists for the 2009 George Washington Book Prize.
The books, which were chosen from 78 entries, include an epic history of Thomas Jefferson's African-American relatives, a prodigious exploration of Jefferson's literary and intellectual development, and a tale of investment skullduggery and financial meltdown that eerily foreshadows today’s headlines.
The
Source: Independent (UK)
Feb 20, 2009
Victor Kiernan, professor emeritus of Modern History at Edinburgh University, was an erudite Marxist historian with wide-ranging interests that spanned virtually every continent. His passion for history and radical politics, classical languages and world literature was evenly divided.
His interest in languages was developed at home in south Manchester. His father worked for the Manchester Ship Canal as a translator of Spanish and Portuguese and young Victor picked these up even befo
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Feb 19, 2009
Joel Kovel — one of the more outspoken professorial critics of Israel on American college campuses — is out of his job at Bard College. This week Kovel sent a letter to all Bard faculty members denouncing the way he has been treated and charging that his politics cost him the position.
Others suggest, however, that Kovel was treated the way many non-tenured professors are being treated these days as colleges retrench — and that mixed student reviews of his organizational skills in t
Source: http://www.pantagraph.com
Feb 19, 2009
Historian James Horton said Wednesday that Abraham Lincoln’s iconic status as the man who helped save the Union and end slavery doesn’t always convey the complexity of the 16th president’s dilemma.
“In the 21st century, we don’t sometimes understand how difficult it was to even think about bringing slavery to an end,” said Horton, IWU Founders’ Day convocation speaker and a member of the Lincoln Bicentennial Commission,
Slavery was institutionalized for more than two c
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Feb 19, 2009
By an overwhelming margin of 87 to 13 percent, members of the American Anthropological Association have approved changes in its code of ethics that are designed to strengthen its protections of people who are studied, and to promote the values of free dissemination of scholarship.
But the degree of consensus among anthropologists may not be reflected by the lopsided outcome: At least some who backed the changes said that they did so because they view them as a step in the right dire
Source: Harvard Crimson
Feb 18, 2009
Jill Lepore may be known around Harvard as the head honcho of the Hist and Lit Department. But during her downtime she’s been cultivating another personality: a colorful, 18th-century Scottish painter named Stewart Jameson, protagonist in her debut novel, “Blindspot.” Lepore co-authored the book, which is a parody of, and homage to, 18th-century style, with Brandeis history professor Jane Kamensky. “Blindspot” tells the story of romance and intrigue in Revolutionary War-era Boston. FM sat down w
Source: John Palattella in The Nation
Feb 18, 2009
A little over a year ago, Doubleday published a study of the rise of neoconservatism called They Knew They Were Right. The book has the trappings of a serious work of original research, such as extensive endnotes about primary sources, suggesting that its author, Jacob Heilbrunn, had toiled in archives and periodical reading rooms. In a review that appeared in this magazine ("Out of Place," June 23, 2008), Corey Robin argued that in its materials and its method They Knew They Were Righ
Source: AFP
Feb 18, 2009
Boubacar Joseph Ndiaye, the veteran curator of Senegal’s historic House of Slaves, whose famous visitors included Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton, died here on Feb. 6. He was 86.
His death after an illness was announced by Hamady Bocoum, director of cultural heritage at Senegal’s Culture Ministry.
For 40 years, Mr. Ndiaye oversaw the memorial on Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal at Dakar. The island was used to hold captured Africans before their perilous voyage to
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 18, 2009
A fledgling group calling itself the U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel now lists 193 faculty members and several student groups at American colleges as endorsing its call for a boycott.
David Lloyd, a professor of English at the University of Southern California who serves as a spokesman for the group, said its supporters were being urged to encourage colleges to divest from companies that provide weapons and weapons systems to the Israeli military. “Th
Source: Stanford News Service
Feb 18, 2009
Caroline Walker Bynum, a professor of European medieval history at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, will be at Stanford Feb. 23-26 as the biennial Raymond Fred West Memorial Lecturer.
Carolyn Walker Bynum, who has been called a historian of feminist spirituality, will give two lectures and two seminars on Christian materiality. All events will be held at the Humanities Center.
The lectures are: "Weeping Statues and Bleeding Bread: Miracles in the Late
Source: Editorial in the WaPo
Feb 18, 2009
THE NEWS stories about Alison Des Forges, who died Thursday in the crash of a Colgan Air plane near Buffalo, naturally focused on her role in trying to prevent, and then to document, the genocide of some 800,000 Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda in 1994. She was fearless and relentless in that heartbreaking role. But, as a friend of Ms. Des Forges's reminded us shortly after her death at age 66, she was also relentless in calling attention to human rights violations by Tutsis when they, in their turn, b
Source: Victor Davis Hanson at Pajamasmedia.com
Feb 17, 2009
Things seemed pretty bad as I counted over 100 ‘For Sale” signs in a mere five mile stretch. I collated my own status. The equity on the farm is way down. I figure I lost about the last 5 years of 401(k) contributions— omnis effusus labor as Virgil says of Orpheus in the Georgics or as my favorite singer Mark Knopfler sings: “And if it’s all for nothing. All the road running it’s been in vain.” The Tribune Media outlet for whom I write a weekly syndicated column has declared bankruptcy, and some
Source: http://www.scoop44.com
Feb 17, 2009
One day before spending Martin Luther King Jr. day with the soon-to-be President Barrack Obama, nationally esteemed scholar and author Dr. Cornell West critiqued multiple aspects of Obama’s policy.
West gave the keynote address at a two-day conference hosted by Ohio University honoring 100th birthday of Mahmoud Mahamed Taha, a Sudanese Muslim regarded as the founder of progressive Islam.
He challenged Obama to speak out about foreign conflict, and to address the Israeli-Pales
