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: http://www.utsnyc.edu (date uncertain)
Feb 6, 2009
The Rev. Dr. Robert T. Handy, Henry Sloane Coffin Professor Emeritus of Church History at Union Theological Seminary, died at Crane’s Mill Retirement Community in West Caldwell, New Jersey, on January 8. He was 90 years old.
During the 36 years he taught at the Seminary, Handy made a name for himself as an impressive scholar of American church history, an exceptional teacher, and a gifted administrator.
"From the very first I knew him to be one of a cluster of facu
Source: Note to Peter Klingman from the staff of the American Historical Review in response to his submission
Feb 6, 2009
Related Links
HNN Hot Topics: The Watergate Transcript Controversy
NYT News Story:"Journal Rejects Essay About Nixon Tapes"
Summary and comment: This submission is too short (4868 words) for consideration by the AHR. It also covers too particular a historical concern -- an editorial corrective of a prima
Source: Ron Radosh at his blog at pajamasmedia.com
Feb 6, 2009
The American intellectual community suffered a great loss last week, when John P. Diggins died suddenly from complications from colon cancer. Jack’s death came as a shock to many of his friends and colleagues, to whom he never mentioned his illness.
Jack Diggins was a unique figure in our polarized times. He was intellectually and politically engaged. Yet unlike so many, it was impossible to predict what he would say and where he would come down on so many issues. He could be sharp
Source: Newark Star-Ledger
Feb 5, 2009
About a decade ago, imaginations were captured by a tale of African-Americans weaving secret codes into quilt patterns in the 1800s to pass on clues and directions to runaway slaves in their perilous journey to freedom.
Previously considered folklore and once the basis for a children's fiction book, many people began to believe it was fact after the 1999 publication of "Hidden in Plain View," a non-fiction book embraced by celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey. In it, a South
Source: Campus Watch
Feb 5, 2009
Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, has been caught in a lie. Khalidi concluded a January 8, 2009, op-ed that appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald
Source: Website of the Council on Foreign Relations
Feb 3, 2009
Walter Russell Mead, an award-winning historian, says the backlash against free-market capitalism being embraced in the United States and elsewhere right now endangers America's standing in the world. He says these protectionist fears are most significant in relation to China: "The key political question of the twenty-first century is, 'How does the U.S.-China relationship develop?'" Relations with China have steadily improved, Mead says, but if China thinks the United States is shutti
Source: AHA Blog
Feb 3, 2009
[HNN Editor: In his remarks Hochshild noted that he has been telling friends he won the Roosevelt-Wilson award, in the vain hope that they will think the Roosevelt in question was Franklin not Theodore.]
AHA President Gabrielle Spiegel presided over last night’s “Opening of the 123rd Annual Meeting,” starting off with a quick welcome to participants and audience members, then moving on to the night’s events. First off was the presentation of the sixth Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wil
Source: http://www.middletownpress.com
Feb 2, 2009
A peaceful protest preceded a speech by a controversial author and professor at Wesleyan University Monday.
Benny Morris, writer of “1948: A History of the First Arab Israeli War,” spoke to a room full of students and teachers from the university, but his speech did not entail the concepts that most vexed protestors outside the Usdan Center.
The group opposed to Morris’ speech — the Middle East Crisis Committee — accuses him of favoring ethnic cleansing.
“W
Source: Press Release--David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Feb 2, 2009
Three biographers of Franklin D. Roosevelt have topped the annual list of the ten “most absurd statements” about the Allies’ response to the Holocaust.
The annual list for 2008 was released this week by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in conjunction with the recent commemoration of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Topping the Absurdities list for 2008 was a statement by FDR biographer H.W. Brands claiming that the Allies would have had to div
Source: American Historical Review
Feb 1, 2009
Two thousand and eight marked the fortieth anniversary of a remarkable year, a year that has come to stand for a decade which, to rephrase Paul Kantner's memorable quip, we can only remember if we weren't there. Two months late, we present the first part of a two‐part AHR Forum, “The International 1968,” an act of historical recovery and analysis by seven historians who, whether they were there or not, offer a range of perspectives on the politics, the protests, the social and cultural tra
Source: Allan J. Lichtman in the OAH Newsletter
Feb 1, 2009
Like E. H. Carr, I believe that history is as much about the future as about the past. This belief has guided my rather unorthodox forty-year career as a historian and led me to become an unofficial stand-in for Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama in mock presidential debates this past September in Russia. I took part in twelve such debates, sponsored by the United States Department of State, during a hectic ten-day period in four Russian cities—Moscow, Ryazan, St. Petersburg, and Yek
Source: Jane Kamensky and Jill Lepore in the OAH Newsletter
Feb 1, 2009
What happens when historians write fiction? We decided to find out. Blindspot, our novel, is set in 1764, in Boston, a city reeling from the economic downturn following the French and Indian War, and beginning to simmer with the fires of liberty. The book tells the story of Stewart Jameson, a Scottish portrait painter fleeing debtor’s prison, and Fanny Easton, the fallen daughter of one of Boston’s richest merchants, who poses as a boy to gain a situation as Jameson’s apprentice. Their lives tak
Source: Richard Byrne in Book Forum
Feb 1, 2009
... John H. Summers, author of the new volume of essays Every Fury on Earth, represents a brusque and welcome voice. A lecturer at Columbia University and a visiting scholar at Boston College’s Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, Summers writes pieces that traverse multiple disciplines—history, sociology, literature—and bristle with elegant pugnacity. Whether he is blowing the dust off late-nineteenth-century sex scandals or slashing at the parlous state of adjunct labor in the a
Source: New York Times frontpage story
Jan 31, 2009
Key Links
Stanley I. Kutler: Response to the NYT
HNN Hot Topics: The Watergate Transcript Controversy
HNN EditorThis news story concerns an article submitted to the American Historical Review by independent historian Peter Klingman that claims historian Stanley Kutler misrepresented Watergate transcripts in such a
Source: Times (UK)
Jan 31, 2009
The jury of a prestigious Italian literary prize run by an Italian grappa distillery has named the historian Hugh Thomas, Baron Thomas of Swynnerton, winner of this year’s award as a “master of our time” for his lifetime’s achievement.
The jury of the Nonino prize, chaired by the writer V. S. Naipaul, said that Thomas, noted for his histories of the Spanish Civil War and the conquest of Mexico, had crowned this achievement with The Slave Trade, an “immense work” which told a painful
Source: Cynthia Haven at the website of the Stanford News Service
Jan 30, 2009
Everyone's heard it: "Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it." Despite Santayana's well-worn bromide, however, history is no amulet against repetition, according to Norman Naimark, the Robert and Florence McDonnell Professor of Eastern European Studies.
Naimark gave his talk, "Passing the Torch: Thoughts about History, Teaching, and Mentorship," on Jan. 29 for the Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching series sponsored by the Center for Teaching
Source: PBS Bill Moyers's Journal
Jan 30, 2009
... MARILYN YOUNG: You know, the thing that gets me, Obama appoints George Mitchell and he says what we're going to do is listen. What we're going to do is figure we're just going to listen. And in his first press interview on that Arab TV network, which was a brilliant move I thought, he talked about respect. BARACK OBAMA [SOT]: We are ready to initiate a new partnership based on mutual respect and mutual interest.
MARILYN YOUNG: He used the word "respect" repeatedly. And
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 30, 2009
Last month Clement A. Price, a member of the Obama transition team’s committee on the arts, spent several days walking the halls of the National Endowment for the Humanities, interviewing program officers and generally taking the temperature of the place.
It was an interesting moment to visit. Not only was a new president preparing to take office, but the endowment was about to lose the longest-serving chairman in its history. Bruce Cole, who had served in that role since 2001, anno
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jan 29, 2009
There is support, albeit from an unlikely quarter, for Pope Benedict XVI after he chose to rehabilitate Bishop Richard Williamson, who had questioned the scale of the Holocaust.
David Irving, the controversial historian, has disclosed that he is a friend of the bishop.
"I think he's a man who clearly thinks for himself and I agree with his opinions on Catholicism," says Irving, who was imprisoned in Austria for breaking the country's strict anti-Nazi laws. &qu
Source: AP
Jan 29, 2009
Samantha Power, the Harvard University professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who earned notoriety for calling Hillary Rodham Clinton a "monster" while working to elect Barack Obama president, will take a senior foreign policy job at the White House, The Associated Press has learned.
Officials familiar with the decision say Obama has tapped Power to be senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, a job that will require close contact and
