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: Marie Morgan and Edmund S. Morgan in the NYRB in the course of a review of Annette Gordon-Reed's new book, The Hemingses of Monticello
Oct 9, 2008
The Hemingses of Monticello is a brilliant book. It marks the author as one of the most astute, insightful, and forthright historians of this generation. Not least of Annette Gordon-Reed’s achievements is her ability to bring fresh perspectives to the life of a man whose personality and character have been scrutinized, explained, and justified by a host of historians and biographers. They have struggled to illuminate, and sometimes to gloss over, the dark places in his life. Like many upright pu
Source: http://www.danwei.org
Oct 7, 2008
Yan Chongnian (阎崇年), a scholar specializing in Qing history and Manchu culture, was attacked on October 5 when he was in Wuxi to promote his new book, The Kangxi Emperor. The prolific author was smacked twice in the face, allegedly because the attacker disagreed with his historical views.
Yan is the director of the Manchu studies department at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and is a guest host on the CCTV-10 TV show Lecture Room. That program
Source: Neve Gordon interviewed by Chris Spannos
Oct 7, 2008
Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and is the author of Israel's Occupation. Visit his website at www.israelsoccupation.info
Chris Spannos is a staff member with Z.(1) Where did your book Israel's Occupation come from? The book has two distinct sources. First and foremost, it is a product of many years of activism in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. My understanding of the forms of control deployed in the Gaza Strip and West B
Source: Randy Saunders, 50th Space Wing Historian, writing at the website of http://www.schriever.af.mil
Oct 6, 2008
SCHRIEVER AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. - -- As a historian, I am aware of the influence history has on our present actions and attitudes and on our pathways for the future. During my recent deployment to Manas Air Base, Kyrgyz Republic, the Airmen of the 376th Air Expeditionary Wing knew their past and embraced it.
I arrived at Manas only knowing that I had a huge mission to accomplish--to build a history program where none existed before. My first goal was to learn the history of the win
Source: http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com
Oct 5, 2008
Award-winning presidential historian Michael Beschloss finds a glimmer of hope in one aspect of the upcoming presidential election.
"One reassuring thing is that both candidates realize that this is a country that needs to be healed," he said at Aurora University Tuesday. "Whoever is president is going to have to reach across the aisle."
Beschloss gave his comments during a presentation on presidential courage. He offered his opinion as to the vulner
Source: Eric Foner in the NYT Book Review
Oct 3, 2008
... In 1997, Annette Gordon-Reed, who teaches at New York Law School and in the history department of Rutgers University, published “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy.” Reviewing the evidence, she concluded it was likely that Jefferson had fathered Hemings’s children. But her main argument was that generations of Jefferson scholars had misused historical sources to defend the great man’s reputation. For example, they had dismissed as worthless the recollections of Madis
Source: http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews
Oct 3, 2008
Stories and memorabilia from Birmingham's civil rights past and the earliest middle-class black communities may one day find a home in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Director Lonnie G. Bunch was in Birmingham on Thursday seeking ideas for the museum, which is scheduled to open in 2015 on the National Mall in Washington. Birmingham is one of several cities Bunch is visiting to help form the vision of the museum.
"None of us
Source: New Criterion editorial
Oct 3, 2008
The last time we checked, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States was in its twenty-fifth printing and had sold some 500,000 copies. It is probably more widely used in American classrooms than any other survey of the subject. This is a pity, for the book should really be titled "An Anti-American History of the United States." Although published long before the term "political correctness" gained currency, Howard Zinn's opus is a perfect specimen of political cor
Source: Martin E. Marty in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Oct 3, 2008
The University of Notre Dame's Mark A. Noll is one of our leading historians of religion, specializing in the history of evangelicalism. Never dull or predictable, he has consistently presented a face of evangelicalism that I hope more of the public can meet, showing its constituencies to be far more diverse than most news-media comment suggests.
Now Noll has given us God and Race in American Politics: A Short History, a book not about the 2008 presidential election, but one that —
Source: http://missoulian.com
Oct 2, 2008
University of Montana assistant professor Kyle Volk worked out a deal with El Diablo, a Missoula Mexican restaurant, to sponsor one of his history classes, then learned it was against university policy.
On the projector screen was a logo for the local burrito and taco joint, El Diablo.
The same logo was printed on the class syllabus for “The Americas: Conquest to Capitalism,” and a sticker for El Diablo was clipped to it.
“I've never seen anything like it,
Source: Daily Princetonian
Oct 1, 2008
Though rumors have been circulating on the internet recently that noted Civil War historian and Georgetown associate professor Chandra Manning may be joining the Princeton’s history department, Manning denied these rumors in an interview with The Daily Princetonian this week.
“I know that over the summer there was some internet speculation,” Manning said in an interview Monday, “but I’m actually very happy at Georgetown, and I’m planning on staying.”
Manning, who receiv
Source: Australian
Sep 29, 2008
HISTORY has been "dulled down" by focusing exclusively on analysing evidence and argument, with historians neglecting their role as storytellers.
Award-winning historian Peter Cochrane is urging his colleagues to look to the narrative techniques of literature to recreate the past in a vivid and lively way.
Cochrane, an inaugural winner of the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History, said historians should be able to cross freely into the territory of nov
Source: http://news.uky.edu
Sep 29, 2008
James Klotter, University of Kentucky alumnus and Kentucky State Historian, was honored Sept. 29 with the Outstanding Alumnus of Kentucky (OAK) Award. The recognition took place at a luncheon during the 2008 Governor’s Conference on Postsecondary Education Trusteeship in Lexington.
Following the keynote address by Governor Steve Beshear, the OAK and Acorn Awards were presented by Secretary of State Trey Grayson. The awards are sponsored by the Kentucky Advocates for Higher Education
Source: AFP
Sep 28, 2008
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Sunday blamed an extreme right-wing group for an attack on an Israeli peace campaigner and warned that the country was facing an ill-wind of extremism.
"Police and interior security were given orders to do their utmost to arrest the culprits as soon as possible," he told journalists after historian Zeev Sternhell was wounded by a pipe bomb at his home in Jerusalem on Thursday.
"This appears to be the work of a clandestine g
Source: NYT
Sep 28, 2008
It was a Dickensian beginning, William Woodruff’s, to say the least. He was born on a heap of cotton in the mill where his parents worked and his grandfather died. Then, with a market crash in 1920, England’s mills themselves died.
His proud family sank into a poverty so profound that his grandmother starved to death rather than take welfare. His unemployed father sewed mailbags in a tiny kitchen — the same work inmates did in the local jail.
And Mr. Woodruff, who later
Source: NYT
Sep 28, 2008
Marc Raeff, a Russian émigré who came to the United States at 18, served in the United States Army during World War II and became one of the country’s leading scholars of Russian history, writing the first study of the Russian diaspora, died on Sept. 20 in Teaneck, N.J. He was 85....
HNN Editor: A reader of HNN, David McDonald, has sent along an email indicating that the Times obituary omitted important contributions made by Professor Raeff. Email from David McDonald
Source: Times (UK)
Sep 28, 2008
He was a mother’s boy, a precocious intellect, a dandy and a tyrant whose pursuit of fame was obsessive. Uncharitable souls might project these traits of Henry VIII onto David Starkey, the historian and broadcaster, who has poured a lifetime of research into a new study of the king that is being hailed as a triumph.
“This book is Starkey’s masterpiece,” says John Guy, the historian and Tudor scholar, of Henry: Virtuous Prince, to be published this week. “It combines the populist tou
Source: Simon Jenkins in the Times (UK)
Sep 28, 2008
“The most evil nation on earth!” At a dinner in Lahore earlier this year I was shocked at the casual anti-Americanism of the conversation. Sophisticated people who knew America and Americans well took it as second nature to excoriate the place. When I expressed surprise, I was told that America was polluting Pakistan’s culture, undermining its democracy and fomenting the Taliban by bombing Pashtun villages. Yes, I said, but could they not distinguish between the misdeeds of a particular presiden
Source: AP
Sep 27, 2008
A prominent death-penalty historian's records have been acquired by the University at Albany.
M. Walt Espy has been described by the New York Times as "America's foremost death penalty historian." The Alabama resident has devoted nearly four decades to documenting more than 15,000 executions in America, dating back to colonial Jamestown.
His work is considered a unique and invaluable contribution to the history of capital punishment in this country. It will be
Source: Star Ledger (NJ)
Sep 26, 2008
It was by his grandfather's side that 4-year-old Lonnie G. Bunch III first saw the pictures. The photographs of several children, perhaps from the 1800s, were in a book his grandfather picked to read with him before din ner. The faces staring back at him had no names, nothing to identify them. Young Lonnie was mesmerized. He wanted to know more about the kids, where they came from, how they lived, if they were happy.
This was his first brush with history, the impetus that put him on a pat
