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: NYT
Sep 26, 2008
Its operating budget deficit this year is $170 million. In May, it outraged tenants by threatening to shutter hundreds of community centers, senior centers and popular programs to cut costs. Three months later, a 5-year-old boy fell to his death at a Brooklyn complex after trying to escape from a stalled elevator, focusing the attention of the press and lawmakers on the agency’s elevator maintenance and oversight.
But at a small gathering on Thursday night at a [NYC] Housing Authori
Source: China Beat
Sep 26, 2008
Paul A. Cohen, professor of history emeritus at Wellesley College and also an associate at the Harvard Fairbank Center, has long been interested in not just what happened but also how historians tell the stories of the past. As one of the strongest advocates for China-centered historical work, Cohen has explored this tension between history and its telling in works that sometimes reveal unknown stories and sometimes confound the traditional tellings of well-known historical events. These earlier
Source: BBC News
Sep 25, 2008
A well-known Israeli critic of Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, Zeev Sternhell, has been slightly wounded in a bomb attack.
Police suspect ultra-nationalists Israelis were behind the attack.
Professor Sternhell has also strongly opposed the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip, describing it as immoral and ineffective.
Earlier this year, Professor Sternhell was awarded the prestigious Israel Prize for political science.
Mr Sternhell s
Source: http://www.canada.com
Sep 24, 2008
Lithuanian prosecutors said Wednesday they are dropping a war crimes investigation of an Israeli Holocaust historian who served with Soviet forces in the Baltic state.
In a statement, the prosecutor's office cited a "failure to collect sufficient data grounding primary suspicions" as its reason for halting its investigation of Yitzhak Arad, 81, who worked with Soviet security forces in the wake of World War II.
"During the investigation, 83 persons were q
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Sep 24, 2008
William Woodruff, who died on Tuesday aged 92, enjoyed a late celebrity in his eighties when his gritty two-volume memoir, The Road to Nab End (2000) and Beyond Nab End (2003), became surprise bestsellers.
Woodruff was brought up in penury among the cotton mills of Blackburn, and eventually made his mark in America as an economic historian. While his blunt description of the indignity of working-class life in the pre-welfare era was a telling corrective for those who like to harp on about
Source: http://www.madison.com
Sep 24, 2008
A science historian at UW-Madison has been named interim director of the University's Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.
Gregg Mitman, 47, is a professor of history of science, medical history, science and technology studies and environmental studies.
Provost Pat Farrell, who announced the two-year appointment Wednesday, said Mitman will help the Nelson Institute meet the goals of a new university-wide strategic plan while addressing the environmental challenge
Source: http://www.thechadronnews.com
Sep 23, 2008
No region suffered more during the drought and Depression in the 1930s than the Northern Great Plains that includes the Dakotas and Nebraska, according to Dr. Rolland Dewing, a long-time history professor at Chadron State College who returned to the campus to speak Wednesday night.
Now a resident of Renton, Wash., Dewing said although some historians have stated the southwestern United States felt the brunt of the Dust Bowl days, his research indicates conditions were even worse in
Source: NYT
Sep 23, 2008
John E. Taylor, a specialist in military history at the National Archives for 63 years and a trusted guide to authors mining the dusty records of past wars, died Saturday at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 87.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said his niece, Claudia Taylor Walsworth.
Mr. Taylor joined the archives staff in September 1945 at the close of World War II, whose intelligence records would become his particular interest. Despite declining health, he
Source: R.J. Stove in the American Conservative
Sep 22, 2008
Connoisseurs of homicidal book reviews have long treasured the virtuosic evisceration that British immunologist Sir Peter Medawar performed in 1950 on Teilhard de Chardin, that once fashionable Gallic mountebank. Of Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man, Medawar remarked, "its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself."
Sir Peter's slashing verdict inevitably comes to a mind confronted with t
Source: Press Release
Sep 22, 2008
On October 1, 2008, ASHP/CML will launch our latest website, Picturing United States History: An Online Resource for Teaching with Visual Evidence. Representing a unique collaboration between historians and art historians, Picturing U.S. History is based on the belief that visual materials are vital to understanding the American past. Visitors to the new website will find Web-based guides, essays, case studies, classroom activities, and online forums to assist high school teachers and college in
Source: Newsletter of the American Revolution Round Table of New York
Sep 22, 2008
On October 7, the American Revolution Round Table of New York will celebrate its Fiftieth Anniversary. It is a day we hope all our members will join us in hailing with pride and pleasure. Fifty years is a long time for any American organization. It is nothing less than amazing for one like the AART, whose officers and committee heads are all volunteers. It is a tribute to the enduring fascination of our subject, the founding of the American republic, an enterprise that has changed the world. It
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Sep 22, 2008
It's the stuff of scholarly nightmares.
You spend years working on a book, toiling in archives, poring over sources, examining and re-examining data, only to discover that you're not alone. Someone else is working on more or less the same book.
It happened to Elisabeth Gitter. Ms. Gitter, a professor of English at the City University of New York's John Jay College of Criminal Justice, spent roughly a decade researching her book on Laura Bridgman. Bridgman was the most-f
Source: Guardian (UK)
Sep 22, 2008
Turkey risks a collapse of its secular political system akin to that of the Soviet Union if it bows to international pressure to recognise the 1915-22 Armenian genocide, the head of Armenia's state memorial to the event has told the Guardian.
Hayk Demoyan said Ankara could not acknowledge the systematic killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman troops during the first world war because it would lead to a wholesale re-writing of history and undermine the ideological basis of
Source: American Conservative
Sep 22, 2008
Connoisseurs of homicidal book reviews have long treasured the virtuosic evisceration that British immunologist Sir Peter Medawar performed in 1950 on Teilhard de Chardin, that once fashionable Gallic mountebank. Of Teilhard’s The Phenomenon of Man, Medawar remarked, “its author can be excused of dishonesty only on the grounds that before deceiving others he has taken great pains to deceive himself.”
Sir Peter’s slashing verdict inevitably comes to a mind confronted with the work of
Source: Marc J. Rauch in The Auto Channel
Sep 21, 2008
If you’ve been watching television, reading newspapers or magazines, or are a regular visitor to automotive and political websites, you’ve heard about T. Boone Picken’s plan to help move America away from its dependency on foreign oil. The Pickens Plan calls for the substitution of foreign oil with domestically produced compressed natural gas and wind power. As much as I admire Boone Pickens and support The Pickens Plan, compared to the proposition laid out by Edwin Black in THE PLAN, it’s merel
Source: NYT
Sep 21, 2008
Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.
They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas.
These initiatives, like the Program in Western Civilization and American Institutions at the Universit
Source: http://www.greenevillesun.com
Sep 21, 2008
A leading U.S. historian who specializes in the Reconstruction period following the Civil War explained Thursday why he is critical of President Andrew Johnson's racial attitudes and policy positions during that turbulent post-war era.
"Andrew Johnson and Reconstruction" was one of the main topics discussed Thursday during a day-long symposium at Tusculum College that focused on the life and political career of the 17th president.
Dr. Eric Foner, a nationally
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
Sep 20, 2008
This afternoon U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ordered the office of vice president Dick Cheney to preserve all records related to his office and the performance of his duties as the case proceeds. The order came in a case organized by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, together with the AHA, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Archivists, and historians Stanley Kutler and Martin Sherwin.
In her opinion, Judge Kollar-Kot
Source: Deseret News
Sep 20, 2008
Bountiful Mayor Joe Johnson hasn't always been a fan of history.
"I took history to pass a test," Johnson admits. "After the test was over, I'd forget all about it."
That attitude changed about six months ago, when he read "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Johnson picked up a copy of the best-seller to prepare for another test o
Source: Juan Cole at his blog Informed Comment
Sep 20, 2008
Fred Kagan has once more been proved wrong. He called the ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs in Baghdad a 'myth.' For all their arrogance and academic credentials, the Neoconservatives keep having trouble with that reality-based thing.Satellite imaging that shows Sunni Arab neighborhoods in Baghdad dark gives evidence that the e
