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.dispatch.co.za
Mar 18, 2008
THE noble ideas of internationally known historian David Rattray were destroyed by six armed robbers who went to his famous Fugitives Drift Lodge and shot him dead.
This was said yesterday by Judge Kate Pillay in the Pietermaritzburg High Court, when she jailed two members of the gang for life for Rattray’s murder, and 10 years for the attempted robbery of Rattray and his receptionist.
The accused, Simphiwe Ndlovu and Sibonela Mponza, pleaded not guilty to the crimes.
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Mar 18, 2008
Congratulations to the winners of this year's Bancroft Prize: Allan M. Brandt of the Harvard Medical School for The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America, Charles Postel of California State, Sacramento, for The Populist Vision, and Peter Silver of Princeton for Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America.
Source: Patrick T. Reardon in the Chicago Tribune
Mar 18, 2008
Nicholson Baker's history of the early stages of the Second World War will surprise and even shock many readers.
Baker, a best-selling novelist, takes a radically different narrative approach from most historians for his non-fiction tale, "Human Smoke" (Simon & Schuster): He knits his story together out of hundreds of small vignettes or scenes, most of which aren't longer than three paragraphs, and, like a documentary filmmaker, he doesn't insert his own voice.
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
Mar 17, 2008
The University of Chicago Press is now making all 115 years of the American Historical Review available to AHA members through an arrangement with JSTOR. Members who log in to the AHR will now be able to browse, search, and read the Review from 1895 to the present.
For the past seven years, the Association only provided full JSTOR access to members for an added fee. With this new arrangement, all members of the Association will enjoy this access as part of their regular dues.
Source: http://allafrica.com
Mar 17, 2008
The Rwanda Historians Association, which is composed mainly of university lecturers and other researchers, was officially launched last week with the aim of properly writing down Rwanda's history which has always been distorted.
The vice-president of the historians' association, Joseph Gahama; the director of culture, Straton Nsanzabaganwa; and the president, Déo Byanafashe, during the launch.
Déo Byanafashe, the president of the association, said that the association s
Source: Deseret News
Mar 17, 2008
Richard E. Turley, former managing director of LDS Church Family and Church History Deparment, has been named as the new assistant Church historian and recorder. According to the LDS Newsroom Web site, the appointment signals "another step forward in (the Church's) commitment to collect, preserve and publish Church historical records.
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 16, 2008
I am as committed to e-mail as anyone I know. But I have come to freeze at the sight of a few headers — the ones that either contain no more than the name of a friend, or those, like the one I received yesterday, that say “Sad News.” I take a deep breath before opening such messages, for I know that it conveys an emotional body blow.
My wife, Adria, and I received such a message yesterday, forwarded by a Princeton neighbor currently doing research in Cape Town (a very 21st century c
Source: Jonathan Yardley in the WaPo
Mar 16, 2008
A quarter century ago Gordon S. Wood, professor of history at Brown University, stepped out of the academic cloister and began writing book reviews -- essays, really, running to around 4,000 words apiece -- for serious but non-academic publications, chiefly the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. No doubt he did so in hopes of reaching a wider readership than previously afforded him by academic journals, but he also did so out of a conviction that too many historians at American unive
Source: NYT
Mar 16, 2008
SAMANTHA POWER strode across the packed room and took a seat, her long sweep of red hair settling around her like a protective shawl. The audience, filled with human rights students and other assorted admirers, stilled, and took her in. There she was, at New York University, back on American soil and miraculously intact, despite having just weathered the most bruising, spectacularly public — and perhaps first — setback in her seemingly unstoppable career.
Ms. Power, who is 37, is a
Source: Kagan in an op ed in the NYT
Mar 16, 2008
[Frederick Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.]
FROM the moment the Bush administration took office, I argued against its apparent preference for high-tech, small-footprint wars, which continued a decade of movement in that direction by senior military leaders and civilian experts. In 2002, I questioned the common triumphalism about American operations in Afghanistan, and particularly the notion of applying the "Afghanistan model" of low-manpo
Source: HNN Staff
Mar 16, 2008
Alan Dawley, a professor of history at the College of New Jersey, died suddenly after suffering a heart attack in Mexico, where he was studying Spanish and meeting with people in the global justice movement in Mexico.
Dawley was a founding member of Historians Against the War.
A celebration of his life and work is planned for June.
Friends who want to participate in this ceremony or to provide reminiscences are asked to send an email to:
Source: CQ Politics
Mar 15, 2008
The New York Times’ Tim Weiner has had the kind of career that most reporters can only dream of. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Weiner’s reporting on national security issues, and particularly the CIA, has earned him the near-unanimous respect of his peers, a loyal following of readers and, of course, clout.
Last summer Weiner’s career reached yet another peak when his latest book, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA,” hit the New York Times best-sell
Source: Israel News
Mar 15, 2008
Controversial historian Ilan Pappe left Israel last year after his endorsement of an academic boycott of Israel exposed him and his family to death threats. Now a professor in England, Pappe maintains that a cultural boycott on his homeland is the only way to end the occupation.
***
Last summer, the Pappe family packed its belongings, rented out its spacious house in Israel and moved to Britain. Ever since his support of an academic boycott on Israel's universities beca
Source: Press Release--www.DallasInstitute.org
Mar 15, 2008
David Greenberg, PhD, Assistant Professor of Journalism & Media Studies and of History at Rutgers University, is the 2008 recipient of the $50,000 Hiett Prize in the Humanities from The Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. The award, which recognizes an emerging leader in the humanities, will be presented at The Dallas Institute’s 2008 Hiett Prize in the Humanities Award Dinner on Tuesday, April 8, at the Dallas Museum of Art.
The Hiett Prize is among the nation’s most p
Source: Daily Mail
Mar 14, 2008
[Sir Roy Colin Strong (born August 23, 1935) is an English art and cultural historian, writer, broadcaster and landscape designer.]
There's nothing new about diets. In a unique experiment a historian put three of them - from very different eras - to the test. So which one worked the best?
Hands up those of you who have never attempted to lose weight? Practically no one, I guess, in this era of universal flab-panic.
I took myself in hand at the close of the Sevent
Source: Seattle PI
Mar 14, 2008
Tom Hanks, executive producer of the seven-part miniseries "John Adams," got the ball rolling on the project three years ago by asking Adams biographer David McCullough to have breakfast with him at a writers conference.
"I've had feelers before about filming 'Adams,' " the famous historian told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "but nobody ever followed up.
I knew immediately that Hanks meant business when he showed up with a copy of the book with a
Source: http://www.mk-news.co.uk
Mar 14, 2008
HISTORIANS gathered to discuss whether Second World War codebreakers knew of the holocaust included one who has been accused of denying there was a holocaust.
Among the guests at a Bletchley Park lecture given by author and journalist Michael Smith on Thursday night was David Irving.
Mr Irving first came to prominence as the historian who wrote a book on the destruction of Dresden He wrote many more novels and was the first historian to challenge the authenticity of the
Source: Andrew G. Bostom at frontpagemag.com
Mar 14, 2008
[Andrew G. Bostom is a frequent contributor to Frontpage Magazine.com, and the author of The Legacy of Jihad, and the forthcoming The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism.]
Last week (March 6, 2008) The Jerusalem Post published an interview with historian Bernard Lewis that touched on a range of subjects, from Lewis’ own cultural identity, to his views on feminism and jihad.
Source: Deseret News
Mar 13, 2008
[Richard] Bushman is the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History Emeritus at Columbia University and holds the Huntington Library fellowship in Pasadena, Calif. He is a former Harvard graduate and professor who also taught at Brigham Young University, Boston University and the University of Delaware. This fall, he will be chairman Chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University.
Bushman said in the last 10 years, there has been huge exposure of Mormonism to the world. The &q
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 13, 2008
Dorothea E. Wyatt was one of 16 original faculty members at the University of Michigan at Flint. She started a career as a history scholar and women’s-rights advocate in 1956 and retired to Virginia in 1975.
Ms. Wyatt, who had no children and no living family, left her entire estate, estimated at $6-million, to the Flint campus’s history department when she died in July at age 98, The Flint Journal reports.
It is the institution’s largest gift from an individual donor,
