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.bnd.com
Mar 2, 2008
Illinois State Historian Thomas Schwartz says almost all 19th century first ladies lived in the shadows.
But Mary Todd Lincoln was the first lady of controversy.
In looking at Mrs. Lincoln, "people will see many similarities with things we take for granted today as being general characteristics of a modern woman," Schwartz said. "But at the time, they weren't accepted and provoked quite a bit of discussion and comment in private letters, in conversation and in
Source: http://winnipegsun.com/Entertainment
Mar 1, 2008
Where the heck was Philippa Gregory when we were all at school learning dusty facts about Henry VIII and his wives?
The historian and novelist breathes new life into the world of the Tudors in The Other Boleyn Girl, a massive bestseller that has become a movie starring Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman. The film, which is in theatres now, concerns the sibling rivalry between Anne and Mary Boleyn, both of whom want the King (Eric Bana) for herself. Sex, intrigue and competition
Source: Bill Moyers Journal
Feb 29, 2008
BILL MOYERS: Populism grew up in America. During the first gilded age - back at the turn of the 19th century huge discrepancies in income and power separated a minority of very rich people who ran the country and everyone else. Then the disparities led to strikes, riots, labor unions, and government regulation of big business.
And today -- Well, that's what I want to put to Nell painter, one of our country's distinguished historians. Her grassroots history of the populist and progre
Source: http://www.interfax-religion.com
Feb 29, 2008
Kosovo independence threatens shrines of Ohrid Lake in Macedonia, President of the Historical Prospects Foundation Dr. Natalya Narochnitskaya said.
“Illegitimacy always gives raise to dissident trends both in religion and in politics. It (Kosovo – IF) will be a state that claims for the territories of other countries in compliance with the Great Albania doctrine. It’s not a secret,” the historian said in her interview to the Vesti TV channel.
“Why they (Europe and the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 28, 2008
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who has been vociferous in his support of Hillary Clinton throughout the Democratic primary season, has caused quite a stir with his latest foray into the realm of presidential punditry. In an acerbic essay that appeared on the Web site of The New Republic, Wilentz charges the Obama campaign with cynically exploiting the issue of race by "deliberately, falsely, and successfully" portraying the Clinton campaign as "unscrupulous race-baiters."
Source: John Judis at the website of the New Republic
Feb 28, 2008
[John B. Judis is a senior editor at The New Republic and a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His book William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (Simon & Schuster) is available in paperback.]
... When I was writing his biography, William F. Buckley, Jr.: Patron Saint of the Conservatives (1988), I had trouble understanding his Catholicism, but I finally figured it out when I was watching him host Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisi
Source: http://www.jta.org
Feb 26, 2008
An Israeli historian expunged suggestions in his book that medieval Jews used Christian blood for Passover rituals.
The new edition of Ariel Toaff's "Passover of Blood" includes a passage in which the Bar-Ilan University professor makes clear that the murder of a Christian child in 15th-century Italy in no way was factually linked to Jewish religious custom.
Toaff in the original book, published last year in Italy, caused an international outcry by writing tha
Source: The Hindu
Feb 26, 2008
NEW DELHI: Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad activists ransacked the office of Delhi University’s History Department head S.Z.H. Jafri on Monday protesting against certain portions of the B.A. History (Honours) syllabus.
The activists allegedly manhandled Prof. Jafri and hurled abuses at him before vandalising the office. They also allegedly threw stones into classrooms and broke doors, windows and furniture of the Department on the North Campus.
Some groups have raise
Source: Eric Rauchway at The Edge of the American West (Blog)
Feb 26, 2008
The picture I would like to show you of George Fredrickson is a picture I don’t have but remember well, a picture I hope some suitably-situated obituarist will retrieve from the original dust-jacket of The Inner Civil War, a picture of a square-jawed George in 1965 with the Kennedy haircut and a straight-stem pipe, looking as if he had just stepped out of
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 26, 2008
Without much fanfare, Columbia University Press has radically restructured Gutenberg-e, its high-profile experiment with digital history monographs, from a subscription-only series to an open-access model. The 36 titles will also be available—in somewhat different form, and enhanced with related scholarship—through Humanities E-Book, a subscription-only collection of digital versions of humanities monographs administered by the American Council of Learned Societies, or ACLS.
The Col
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 26, 2008
... The final agreement released on Monday sketches rules for the relationship, and it appears to have satisfied some but not all of the Faculty Senate's requests. The university and the institute will form an academic advisory committee, with an equal number of personnel from both parties, to oversee concurrent appointments and to develop joint projects.
In an e-mail message to The Chronicle on Monday, Edward S. Countryman, a professor of history and a member of the Faculty Senate,
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
Feb 26, 2008
To the Editor:
Your article about the possible foreclosure of the Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Lenox, Mass. (Arts pages, Feb. 23), has alerted readers that the fascinating abode of one of our best American writers may be closed and therefore crossed off the itinerary of literary and cultural pilgrims. It must be saved.
As an Edith Wharton biographer, I know that intimacy with the house is a way not only into Edith Wharton’s fascinating life but also the Gilded Age m
Source: Wendy Plotkin at H-Net
Feb 25, 2008
H-Net went on-line for the first time fifteen years ago today, on
February 25, 1993. That was the day that H-Urban, the first H-Net list,
sent out its first message -- the program of the Society for American City
and Regional Planning History -- which I typed out by hand.
H-Net (then, History on Line) was conceived by Richard Jensen, Kelly
Richter (a graduate student), and I at University of Illinois at
Chicago (UIC) in the fall of 1992. Jensen was renowned for his work
with computers i
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Feb 25, 2008
Congratulations to Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo is one of the most widely read history blogs. He's won a George Polk Award for legal reporting for TPM's coverage of the Bush administration's firing of eight United States attorneys and forced the Justice Department to put him back on its mailing list for credentialed reporters after it removed him last year. All this and more in Noam Cohen's"
Source: http://www.news.wisc.edu/14805
Feb 25, 2008
History professor Alfred McCoy plays a role in "Taxi to the Dark Side," a harrowing film about U.S. interrogation techniques that won the Academy Award Sunday for best documentary feature.
McCoy, author of "A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror," appears in part of the film to explain how the history of CIA torture research shaped the policy of President Bush's administration.
McCoy got involved in the film
Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
Feb 25, 2008
A Google alert just popped up on my computer. It brought me to "Fiery
Source: NYT
Feb 23, 2008
--John A. Ochsendorf, engineer and architectural historian who uses old technologies that go back to the Incas to improve today’s buildings.
--Nancy G. Siraisi, historian of medicine focusing on the Renaissance.
Source: AP
Feb 23, 2008
PHILADELPHIA - As a child growing up in the 1940s, Charles Blockson was once told by a white teacher that black people had made no contributions to history.
Even as a fourth-grader, Blockson, who is black, knew better. So he began collecting proof.
Today, the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection at Temple University contains more than 30,000 historical items, some dating to the 16th century. It includes Paul Robeson's sheet music, African Bibles, rare letters an
Source: NYT
Feb 23, 2008
Hoping to elevate the art and scholarship of biography, the Graduate Center of the City University of New York is setting up a center where its practitioners can meet, trade ideas and work.
Financed by a $3.7 million gift from the Leon Levy Foundation, the new center will offer four fellowships for this fall to academics and others who are working on biographies, as well as two fellowships to graduate students at CUNY who are writing biographical dissertations. Next year the center
Source: H-Net Roundtable on Melvyn P. Leffler. For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War
Feb 22, 2008
John Lewis Gaddis of Yale University-where, more fittingly now than when
he left Ohio University for Yale, he holds the Robert A. Lovett chair in
history-may be dean of the Cold War historians, but Melvyn Leffler, the
Edward Stettinius professor of history at the University of Virginia, is
in a position to compete with Gaddis. Both scholars have written
landmark books-Strategies of Containment and The United States and the
Origins of the Cold War by Gaddis and A Preponderance of Power by
