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.sonomanews.com
Feb 22, 2008
The Sonoma City Council adopted an idea proposed by Mayor Joanne Sanders and Wednesday night established the position of city historian.
The position would be voluntary and unpaid, with a renewable two-year term. The selected person would be responsible for coordinating, identifying and maintaining historical records and artifacts owned by the city; provide historical updates to the city council; assist with public research; make recommendations regarding preservation of historic re
Source: http://www.thisislancashire.co.uk
Feb 22, 2008
AN AMATEUR historian has discovered that he has the biggest item in his collection of memorabilia hidden under his dining room floor - a Second World War bomb shelter.
Craig Brisbane has been collecting items of local historical interest for years - including postcards of Prestwich in days gone by and letters written by soldiers during the two world wars - but without knowing it he has been sitting on the most exciting item of all.
He made the discovery after rolling up
Source: http://www.roanoke.com
Feb 22, 2008
Virginia Tech police released more details Thursday of an incident that led to a misdemeanor hit-and-run charge against a professor.
Peter Wallenstein was driving a 2003 Chrysler PT Cruiser north on West Campus Drive about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday when he turned right onto Perry Street into the path of a bicyclist, Brian Undercoffer.
Undercoffer, a freshman, hit the rear driver's-side tire of the car, and Wallenstein continued driving, according to a police report of the crash
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of CampusWatch
Feb 22, 2008
The proliferation of dubious conferences on"academic freedom" continues unabated. And, in each case, biased and politicized Middle East studies academics are a major component.In October, 2007, the University of Chicago hosted,"In Defense of Academic Freedom," an event whose unifying theme was"the notion that Jewish group
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 22, 2008
How do the five senses affect our experiences, and how have they informed the course of history? Mark M. Smith, a historian at the University of South Carolina at Columbia, explores those questions in his new book, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (University of California Press/Berg Publishers, 2008). Nothing less than an overview of the history of the senses from antiquity to the present, Smith's latest work seeks to deepen our understanding of soci
Source: http://inside.binghamton.edu
Feb 21, 2008
Charles Budd Forcey, 83, of Fort Myers, Fla., professor emeritus of American history at Binghamton University, died on Feb. 8, as a result of an allergic reaction to a bee sting while on vacation in Mexico.
Forcey joined the Binghamton faculty in 1967 and retired in 1991. Active in professional and political organizations, he authored The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 and A Strong and Free Nation. He was also a Fulbright lecturer
Source: NJ Jewish News
Feb 21, 2008
Israeli historian David Tal sees parallels between the current rain of rockets on Sderot and previous crises in Israeli history.
“Between 1948 and 1966, there were infiltrators everywhere, robbing and stealing,” he said. “After the 1967 war, there was constant bombing from Jordan and then from Lebanon.”
In the past, however, the government had more control over the flow of information, and the incidents of violence were seen as more remote.
“Now, everything
Source: http://www.pittsburghcitypaper
Feb 21, 2008
On Jan. 1, 1808, the U.S. government banned the transatlantic importation of people as slaves. By any account, it was landmark legislation. But its 200th anniversary passed with little public acknowledgement -- and certainly with nothing like the commemorations for the 1976 bicentennial, or even, locally, for Pittsburgh's 250th anniversary.
This inattention puzzles Marcus Rediker, the University of Pittsburgh history professor who recently published his groundbreaking The Slave Ship
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 21, 2008
Tony Judt is uneasy about our contemporary preoccupation with the Holocaust. Writing in The New York Review of Books, the New York University historian worries that the memory of the Holocaust has been "manipulated to local advantage" and become too closely attached to the cause of defending Israel and is therefore losing its universal moral significance.
"Yes, the problem of evil in the last century, to invoke Aren
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
Feb 20, 2008
In letters sent to federal authorities, the American Historical Association objected to recent disclosures that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed records from interrogations of individuals suspected of terrorism, and requested action to prevent further loss.
The letters, signed by AHA Executive Director Arnita Jones with the unanimous support of the AHA Council, notes that these records were “historically significant and legally important, and their destruction impoverishes
Source: Douglas Murray in the spectator.co.uk
Feb 20, 2008
Michael Burleigh is riding a career high. The author of the 2000 bestseller The Third Reich: A New History has just published the last of a gargantuan trilogy of books on religion and politics in Europe since the French revolution. Earthly Powers and Sacred Causes took us up to the war on terror. Now, with Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, Burleigh comes right up to date. Not that Blood and Rage is only about Islamic fundamentalism. As the 52-year-old former academic tells me when
Source: http://www.dailycardinal.com
Feb 19, 2008
Bud Selig, commissioner of Major League Baseball and a UW-Madison alumnus, told students Monday his history degree helped him achieve success in sports management.
History Department Chair Professor David McDonald introduced Selig as the department’s “most prominent and certainly our most visible alumnus.”
Selig graduated from UW-Madison with a history degree in 1956. As an undergraduate student with a deep love for baseball, Selig said he dreamed of someday becoming a
Source: Peter Read in the Australian
Feb 18, 2008
[Peter Read is research professor in the department of history at the University of Sydney.]
LAST week marked a week for which some of the Stolen Generations have waited all their lives. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report polarised the nation. Prime minister John Howard's strong refusal to give an apology continued for the life of his government. An apology, promised first by Kim Beazley, later by Kevin Rudd, finally occurred in the federal Parliament last Wednesday.
Ke
Source: Francesca Mari in the New Republic
Feb 18, 2008
In Philip Roth's latest book, Exit Ghost, Amy Bellette has to be hauled out of the New York Public Library kicking and screaming. Her lover, the fictional writer E.I. Lonoff, isn't represented among a display of America's best authors, and Bellette is furious--not only at his absence, but also at the authors included instead. More than anything, Bellette is enraged by the cost of political correctness. "It started with the colleges," she later says, "and now it's everywhere. Richa
Source: Boston Globe
Feb 18, 2008
"This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," the roundly acclaimed new book from Harvard University president Drew Gilpin Faust, is also a fast-rising bestseller.With 35,000 copies sold since early January, the scholarly book has vaulted to seventh on the New York Times nonfiction list and recently climbed to 30th on the Amazon.com bestseller list, mainly populated by works of pop-culture icons John Grisham, James Patterson, Stephen King, and an
Source: Special to HNN
Feb 18, 2008
For a new book on the influence of Betty Friedan's 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique," I am trying to get a feel for how men and women in different time periods and situations reacted to this book, or merely to the general idea of a "feminine mystique," whether or not they actually read the book. I have listed some questions below, but feel free to tell me anything you feel would be useful, and in as much detail as you you have time to provide
If you heard the co
Source: http://thechronicleherald.ca (Canada)
Feb 17, 2008
IT WAS A YEAR straight out of a book for Karolyn Smardz Frost.
2007 opened with the release of her critically acclaimed book, I’ve Got A Home In Glory Land: A Lost Tale of The Underground Railroad.
But even she couldn’t have what would happen later in the year. Late last year, she received the Governor General’s Award for Non-Fiction at a ceremony in Ottawa filled with memorable moments and the chance to make new friends in the Canadian publishing industry, such as Hali
Source: Eric Alterman at the website of the Center for American Progress, followed by a response by Philip Zelikow (appended by Alterman to his own article)
Feb 15, 2008
[Eric Alterman is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and a Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn College, and a professor of journalism at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. His blog, “Altercation,” appears at www.mediamatters.org/altercation. His seventh book, Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, will be published in March.]
President George W. Bush used his address to th
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 15, 2008
The UC Berkeley graduate student behind the wheel in the car crash that killed Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Halberstam in Menlo Park was sentenced Thursday to five days in the county jail and 200 hours of community service.
Judge Mark Forcum recommended that journalism graduate student Kevin Jones, 27, serve his jail sentence in the San Mateo County sheriff's work program, meaning he will probably pick up trash or do similar work rather than spend any time behind bars.
Source: New Republic
Feb 15, 2008
Niall Ferguson
I cannot let Amartya Sen's otherwise enjoyable piece ("Imperial Illusions", December 31) pass without a protest at his misuse of me as a straw man. Professor Sen may find Empire"rather didactic". He may even be justified in calling it"a guarded but enthusiastic celebration of British imperialism." But it is a complete misrepresentation to imply, as he does, that I have argued anywhere that"Americans [should] be inspired by ... early British rule in India". On the cont
