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: Press Release
Jun 30, 2008
The editor of The Biographer’s Craft has published an open letter to American biographers in the July issue calling on them to form a national organization.
“The time has come for biographers to unite. We have nothing to lose but our isolation,” wrote James McGrath Morris.
“The craft of biography, like that of most writing genres, is a solitary one. But we have strong reasons to come together. We need access to resources, such as newspapers or archival documents; we
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 29, 2008
Simon Montefiore is well known for his historical writing on Russian subjects. In a letter to his readers at the beginning of his first novel, Sashenka, he explains how, in the course of his research in the Russian state archives, he was moved by the material he discovered that bore testimony to the courage and suffering of Russian women, particularly during the years of Stalin's terror.
The documents he studied were intensely personal - names, intimate details, even photographs of
Source: Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian
Jun 28, 2008
Nigel Hamilton opens his new primer How to Do Biography (Harvard) with the bold boast that we are living in "a golden age" of life writing. Really, he should know better. To anyone who reads, reviews or writes on the subject, such confidence is baffling. (Hamilton, a Briton, lives mainly in the States, which may account for his rosy myopia.) Seen close up, and with an eye to proper detail, biography appears in rather a bad way. "Crisis" would probably be putting it too strong
Source: NYT
Jun 28, 2008
Charles Parkhurst, a museum director in Baltimore and Washington and one of the “monuments men,” an Allied Forces team that chased down leads, pried open crates and snooped around museums, salt mines and castles in search of art stolen by the Nazis during World War II, died on Thursday at his home in Amherst, Mass. He was 95.
The death was confirmed by his wife, Carol Clark. As a lieutenant in the Navy and a trained art historian, Mr. Parkhurst was deputy chief of Monuments, Fine Ar
Source: UPI
Jun 27, 2008
A historian at Brigham Young University argues that Mormons were persecuted in Missouri in 1838 in a deliberate and successful effort to get their land.Joseph Walker, who is working on the Joseph Smith papers, said documents show the Extermination Order of 1838 -- aimed at the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints -- was timed to prevent Mormons from buying land they had improved, Mormon Times reported.Local laws allowed what was known as pre-emption, Walker says. Settlers had the right to buy government land they had lived on and farmed, but if they were unable to do so, others could buy the improved land at the price of vacant land....
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com
Jun 26, 2008
Standing at the edge of Gettysburg's battlefield, Gabor Boritt once again delivered his classic speech regarding the famous three-day-long battle.
Using plenty of animated gestures, Boritt pointed out troop alignments in the field, showed how the landscape played a decisive role and described deadly mistakes made by both the Confederate and Union sides. It's a story Boritt, a Civil War history professor at Gettysburg College, knows well and is almost always happy to share.
Source: Simon Winchester in the NY Sun
Jun 25, 2008
This totally absorbing book [The Black Death] presents the best account ever written about the worst event to have ever befallen the British Isles. In the hands of John Hatcher, an English medievalist of sober and steady reputation who has for decades been squirreled away in one of the smaller, older, and least obtrusive of Cambridge colleges, the extraordinary tragedy of the great plague — which wiped out as much as 60% of the population of 14th-century Europe and killed an estimated 75 million
Source: http://www.citypaper.com
Jun 25, 2008
ALVIN BRUNSON DIDN'T EVEN WANT the house that broke his leg and then killed him.
He tried to leave it behind in 1994, but the three-story rowhouse across the street from his own home on the 500 block of Wilson Street caught up to him--or anyway, the back taxes did. The city took him to court, and he lost, so he paid them.
And then Brunson's nightmare really began.
The history of 562 Wilson St. and Alvin K. Brunson (friends call him Kirby) is told in a two-i
Source: Jewish Press
Jun 25, 2008
Rick Perlstein, an unabashed man of the left, first attracted wide notice seven years ago with the release of Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, his engagingly written and fair-minded study of the rise of the American conservative movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Last month brought the much-awaited publication of the second volume of Perlstein’s projected trilogy on American conservatism. Nixonland (Scribner), as should be obv
Source: Susan Jakes at China Beat (blog)
Jun 25, 2008
[One member of the China Beat team, Susan Jakes, has had the unusual experience of both taking Jonathan Spence’s famous “History of Modern China” course as a Yale undergraduate, and then later returning to the university as a graduate student and serving as a teaching assistant for a later version of the same class. As a complement to our series on Spence’s Reith Lectures, we asked her to reflect on this experience.]
I first heard Jonathan Spence give a lecture thirty minutes or so
Source: NYT
Jun 25, 2008
Richard J. Koke, who as curator of the New-York Historical Society for nearly 40 years organized much of the institution’s transformation from a repository of documents and artworks into a space where visitors come face to face with relics of New York City and its place in American history, died on May 28 in Plattsburgh, N.Y. He was 91 and lived in Peru, N.Y.
His death was confirmed by Linda S. Ferber, the historical society’s museum director.
Mr. Koke was curator of th
Source: http://www.thebulletin.us
Jun 24, 2008
Historian and National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser appeared at the National Constitution Center last night to discuss a founding father currently outshined in the contemporary media spotlight.
Alvin Felzenberg, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that George Washington does not enjoy the kind of prominent cinematic representation that HBO recently gave to John Adams or that Steven Spielberg aspires to give to Abraham Lincoln. He inquired of M
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
Jun 23, 2008
[Note: This post is a shortened version of the presentation Robert Townsend gave at the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. See also last Wednesday’s post by David Darlington on coverage of the conference: Reports from the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women.]
It is difficult to find a fair benchmark for assessing the progress of women in the history discipline. As you probably know, history is much less diverse than the larger American population, so se
Source: PRnewswire
Jun 23, 2008
Allan R. Millett has been selected to receive the 2008 Pritzker Military Library Literature Award for Lifetime Achievement in Military Writing. The $100,000 honorarium, citation and medallion, sponsored by the Chicago-based Tawani Foundation, will be presented at the Library's annual Liberty Gala on October 4, 2008 at Chicago's Drake Hotel. The announcement was made today via Internet webcast by the Library's President and Founder, COL (IL) James N. Pritzker IL ARNG (Ret.), at http://www.pritzke
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jun 23, 2008
In the 90s, a typical night for Craig Seymour included G-strings, elbow grease, and dollar bills in his socks.
Between sets at Washington, D.C.’s gay strip clubs – unique institutions while they lasted, where hands-on experiences were encouraged — he graded papers, “red pen in hand.”
“The truth was that stripping had long called out to me. It offered something different from my grad school grind of dealing with students, grading papers, and sitting through seemingly end
Source: HNN Staff
Jun 23, 2008
Ride the NYC subway these days and you might find yourself starring up at an advertisement featuring the faces of David Nasaw (author of the new biography of Andrew Carnegie) and Michael Wallace (author of A New Deal for New York). CUNY is honoring the historians (and selling the school!). We took this photo on the #4 train headed downtown.
Nasaw is on the left, Wallace on the right.
Source: New Republic
Jun 23, 2008
From: Rick Perlstein
To: Sean Wilentz
Dear Sean,
I've been wielding my Nixon hammer for so long now--I signed the book contract for Nixonland in November of 2001--that sometimes the whole world starts to look like Nixon-shaped nails. Ask my friends: I've got a Nixon story for every occasion. And I mean every occasion: You call my book "sassy," and that reminds me of a story about Alger Hiss's car. ...
And your opening thoughts get to
Source: Charles W. Hayford at the China Beat blog
Jun 23, 2008
[Charles W. Hayford is Visiting Scholar, Department of History, Northwestern University, and Editor of the Journal of American-East Asian Relations.]
In the third lecture of the Chinese Vistas series, “American Dreams,” Jonathan Spence talked about American dreams of China and, more tantalizing, Chinese dreams of America. He sees a series of “paradoxes” from the American Revolution to the present which set Chinese and American dreams at odds.
Source: Marc J. O’Reilly at the Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH blog)
Jun 23, 2008
[Marc J. O’Reilly is assistant professor of political science at Heidelberg College in Tiffin, Ohio. His new book is Unexceptional: America’s Empire in the Persian Gulf, 1941-2008.]
Unexceptional started as a Ph.D. dissertation. As a graduate student in political science and history in the late 1990s, I wanted to write on a U.S. foreign policy topic with contemporary relevance and historical antecedents. I had read some works on empire—a fascinating, albeit maligned, subject—and won
Source: NYT
Jun 23, 2008
Rudolph J. Vecoli, an Italian-American historian whose searching chronicles of the American immigrant experience gave a new view of what immigrants kept and left behind, died on June 17 in St. Louis Park, Minn. He was 81 and lived in St. Paul.
The cause was complications of leukemia, said his daughter, Lisa.
As director for many years of the Immigration History Research Center at the University of Minnesota and in numerous scholarly articles and books, including “The Pe
