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: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Nov 20, 2008
Ted Sherman and Josh Margolin,"Report says Rutgers failed to properly oversee athletics department," Newark Star-Ledger, 20 November, says a newly released report lays the blame for the out-of-control and still foundering athletic program at the feet of the University's president, historian Richard L. McCormick, and the sc
Source: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
Nov 20, 2008
Below is a statement on Iran that I and others are hoping will be adopted in Washington as a way forward. Any of my readers who has a way of getting this statement to decision-makers in Washington should please do so. Just Foreign Policy is doing it as a petition. Also, my blogger colleagues should please comment widely on it.It was carried by wire services
Source: WaPo
Nov 20, 2008
Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction Wednesday night for "The Hemingses of Monticello," her multigenerational portrait of a family once lost to American history.
Accepting the award, Gordon-Reed spoke of "the journey that black people in this country have been on" since the Hemingses were owned by Thomas Jefferson. Referring to the election of Barack Obama, she added that all of America is "on a great journey now."
Source: Columbia University
Nov 20, 2008
Date: November 22, 2008 from 10:00 am to 5:30 pm
Location: Columbia University
Morningside Campus
Low Memorial Library, Rotunda
Contact: For further information regarding this event, please contact Angela Darling by sending email to amd44@columbia.edu .
Info: Click Here to Visit Website.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of Ame
Source: Willamette Week
Nov 19, 2008
Google “Joel Beinin” and prepare for a war of words.
“If one individual can showcase all the flaws of Middle East Studies in academia, Joel Beinin is that man,” proclaims Campus-watch.org, a right-wing website affiliated with the neoconservative activist David Horowitz.
A tenured Stanford University professor who is Jewish and a Middle Eastern history expert, Beinin has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s policies toward Palestine. As a result, he has been a frequent t
Source: Politico.com
Nov 19, 2008
Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln” (Simon & Schuster, 944 pp.) was a commercial success when it was published in 2005, but starting with the 2008 presidential election cycle, it took on new significance as a touchstone for political debate. Long before either party’s nomination was decided, candidates and commentators were referencing Goodwin’s Lincoln biography as a tale of how one president brought former competitors together in a single govern
Source: Ascribe
Nov 19, 2008
Historians should use the 45th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's assassination as a time to focus on the historical event, while debunking still popular conspiracy theories, says a Purdue University historian.
"Historians have pretty much ignored the assassination as a historical event, and they need to weigh in against the excesses of conspiracy theory as false history," says Michael G. Smith, an associate professor of history who will teach a spring semes
Source: ABC4 (SLC, Utah)
Nov 18, 2008
With the passage of Proposition 8 in California - the one banning gay marriage - the LDS Church is now facing a "perfect storm" of negative publicity.
So said one of the nation's leading historians on the LDS Church.
Dr. Jan Shipps has been studying and writing about the LDS Church for decades and decades.
She was also the first non-Mormon to be elected president of the Mormon History Association.
She now suggests the Church is facing
Source: WaPo
Nov 18, 2008
The humanities medals to individuals went to Gabor S. Boritt, Civil War historian; Robert Brookhiser, historian of the early days of the Republic; Harold Holzer, Lincoln scholar; Myron Magnet, editor-at-large of the urban affair magazine "City Journal"; Albert Marrin, an author of more than two dozen books for young adults; Milton J. Rosenberg, radio talk-show host; Thomas A. Saunders III and Jordan Horner Saunders, philanthropists; and Robert H. Smith, a philanthropist whose family is
Source: Mary Ryan in a commentary on Howe's WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT at H-SHEAR'S FORUM
Nov 17, 2008
Daniel Walker Howe's brisk, encyclopedic excursion through the years 1815 to 1845 lingers for a generous number of pages over one of Andrew Jackson's cabinet appointments, that of treasury secretary John Henry Eaton. The political controversy provoked by the risqué reputation of Eaton's wife Peggy garnered nearly as much attention as that landmark event of the Jackson administration, the assault on the Bank of the United States. This is not to suggest that matters of gender and sexuality are beg
Source: Robert Messenger at the website of the NEH
Nov 17, 2008
Harold Holzer’s new book, Lincoln President-Elect, is the thirty-first he has authored, coauthored, or edited on the subject of our sixteenth president. Yet, even after decades of research, writing, and lecturing, Holzer’s appreciation for Lincoln hasn’t flagged. “Lincoln remains a unique touchstone not only because every president in recent memory identifies with him, and draws strength from him, but also because so many ordinary Americans regard him as the symbol of the American dream.”
Source: Esther Ferington at the website of the NEH
Nov 17, 2008
With the approach of the 2009 Lincoln bicentennial, Americans’ interest in Abraham Lincoln has surged, with dozens of new books appearing on the president. But it wasn’t always that way, recalls Gabor Boritt, director and founder of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College and the Robert Fluhrer Professor of Civil War Studies. Lincoln and the Civil War were far less popular in the 1970s than they are today. People “were sick of war, tired of war,” Boritt believes. For a while, he says, Linc
Source: NYT
Nov 17, 2008
When President-elect Barack Obama appeared on “60 Minutes” on CBS on Sunday in his first interview since winning the election, he mentioned having read “a new book out about F .D. R.’s first 100 days” without specifically naming a title or author.
That tantalizing reference set off a scramble for the claim to First Reader rights all day Monday before a spokesman for Mr. Obama disclosed what the president-elect had actually read.
The publishers and authors of at least th
Source: http://www.theweeklychallenger.com
Nov 16, 2008
On political morning in America, Partisan arguments were fading from memory, and everybody you bumped into recognized that something huge has happened with the election of Barack Obama. In the grocery line, at the post office, over coffee, all Americans just seem to sense it.
But what do those who take a longer view, who know history well, say about what feels to many like a singular, transcendent moment?
Listen:
“Monumental ... a major shift in the zeitgeist of
Source: Boston Globe
Nov 16, 2008
HISTORIANS AREN'T SUPPOSED to make things up. Even at its most writerly, history weaves its story out of threads of fact. But the latest book from Jill Lepore and Jane Kamensky, two important academic historians known for carefully documenting the lives of history's minor participants, isn't a bulwark of fact at all. It's a novel.
Next month, Kamensky and Lepore will publish "Blindspot," a novel that depicts Boston a decade before the American Revolution. Packing together
Source: WSJ
Nov 15, 2008
Muhammad Sven Kalisch, a Muslim convert and Germany's first professor of Islamic theology, fasts during the Muslim holy month, doesn't like to shake hands with Muslim women and has spent years studying Islamic scripture. Islam, he says, guides his life.
So it came as something of a surprise when Prof. Kalisch announced the fruit of his theological research. His conclusion: The Prophet Muhammad probably never existed....
He had no doubts at first, but slowly they emerge
Source: Australian
Nov 15, 2008
FOR the historian a new terror has been added to death.
It is that some other historian will write their biography. Brian Matthews's life of Manning Clark is not the first -- that was published by Stephen Holt in 1999 -- nor the last, as Mark McKenna has a work in progress. But in its exposure of Clark's imperfections, it is one of the most candid.
Gone are the days of reticence when Max Crawford, writing about the death of his mentor Arnold Wood, could leave the reader
Source: Globe & Mail
Nov 15, 2008
Long before the subprime meltdown, renowned Scottish historian Niall Ferguson began warning that the world was not immune from a great liquidity crunch.
Prof. Ferguson is a Harvard and Oxford-based expert on the history of economics and empires and has written many bestselling books, including The War of the World. His latest, The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World, explores the power, achievements and monumental failures of finance throughout history. Although he fin
Source: Deborah Lipstadt blog
Nov 15, 2008
Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Racism includes an article on Zionism which is deeply antisemitic in the most classic fashion. It is written by Noel Ignatiev, a name which might ring a bell for some readers. The article presents Zionism as a form of Jewish racism and repeats all the old canards from the 1970s.
Some of the shortcomings and rather outrageous aspects of this story are encapsulated by the letter the American Jewish Committee (AJC) wrote to Macmillan. Among the points made by the
Source: History Today
Nov 14, 2008
New research by University College London has revealed that massive amounts of government compensation were paid out to investors when slavery was abolished in the 19th century. Dr Nick Draper has discovered that £20 million worth of payments were made, a figure that equates to a staggering 40% of government expenditure of the day.Even more surprising are the backgrounds to the recipients. The image many today wou
