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: Carl Hartman in a dispatch by the AP
Jan 27, 2008
Though it happened 1,300 years ago — some of it less than 600 years ago — Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Levering Lewis says a long military-religious campaign bore seeds of troubled 21st century history....
Lewis sees a resemblance between the advanced Western civilization of today compared with the backwardness of many Muslim countries and the advanced Muslim civilization of the first millennium compared with the backwardness of Europe at the time. He acknowledges the comp
Source: Japan Times
Jan 27, 2008
The late Marius Jansen was America's most eminent historian of modern Japan. Admired in Japan and Europe, he not only contributed to the study of Japanese history but also connected that history to the worlds outside this archipelago.
As he said in a 1994 lecture at the Kyoto Conference on Japanese Studies: "Japan studied the rest of the world, but until recently that world studied Japan very little." Indeed, it was only with the generation that Jansen represents that &quo
Source: NYT Book Review
Jan 27, 2008
[David Oshinsky, who holds the Jack S. Blanton chair in history at the University of Texas, is the author of “A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy.”]
No American politician of the 20th century is more reviled by historians and opinion makers than Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, the Wisconsin Republican whose 1950s anti-Communist crusade is synonymous with witch-hunting and repression. Actually, no politician even comes close. Herbert Hoover? True, the Great Depression occu
Source: NYT
Jan 27, 2008
H. Bradford Westerfield, a Yale political scientist whose courses attracted 10,000 students, mostly undergraduates, among them President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, died on Jan. 19 in Watch Hill, R.I. He was 79.
The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his son, Leland Avery Westerfield, said. H. Bradford Westerfield lived in Watch Hill and Hamden, Conn.
Dr. Westerfield’s former students in four decades of teaching, who also included Senators John Ker
Source: http://www.iol.co.za
Jan 25, 2008
A year after the death of renowned Anglo-Zulu War expert David Rattray, whose murder sent shock waves around the world, his unique reputation lives on.
He was killed in front of his wife, Nicky, in a botched attempted robbery at his Fugitives' Drift Lodge and Guest House at Rorke's Drift on January 26 last year.
Police were swift to round up the first of the six-strong gang, and five have so far been arrested. Three have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms, including
Source: Robert KC Johnson at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Jan 25, 2008
William Chafe is widely considered one of the nation’s leading historians of civil rights. The former president of the AHA has, among other works, authored an influential book on the Greensboro sit-ins.In the interests of full disclosure, I’ve come to a very different view of Chafe because of my involvement in the lacrosse case. In March 2006—based on less than one week of press reports—Chafe
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 25, 2008
For many college students, an introductory survey course may be their only exposure to a discipline — and in many courses, a textbook may serve as the guide. With that in mind, a committee of political scientists set out to see how how black people are portrayed in the introductory textbooks used in their discipline — and the results left them concerned.
The textbooks reviewed do feature discussion of black people and issues that affected them, but the most in-depth coverage is typi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 25, 2008
Early in September 1862, after a train trip marked by tedious delays, a 25-year-old Union Army private named Willard A. Cutter arrived in Washington as a member of Company K of the newly formed 150th Pennsylvania Volunteers. Luckily for Matthew Pinsker — and anyone else interested in history — Company K was sent to a height of land overlooking the city to guard the Soldiers' Home, where Abraham Lincoln and his family were spending the summer in a cottage on the grounds. There Cutter began writin
Source: Drew Faust in a letter to the editor of Business Week (followed by editor's clarification)
Jan 24, 2008
Drew Gilpin Faust
President, Harvard University
CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
I have communicated directly with the group of public-university provosts who wrote to BusinessWeek ("Educational Excellence, Without Ivy," Outside Shot, Jan. 14) about views inaccurately attributed to me in "The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League" (In Depth, Dec. 10, 2007). But I would like to express to BusinessWeek's broader readership that the mischaracterization of my beliefs thro
Source: Earth Times
Jan 24, 2008
Germans have drawn clear lessons relevant to today from the events of 75 years ago that brought Adolf Hitler to power, a prominent German historian said Thursday. "What is decisive is that Germans after 1945 have learnt that rejecting Western democracy leads to catastrophe for them," Heinrich August Winkler told an audience of foreign correspondents in Berlin.
Recalling the events of the so-called "Third Reich" and the moral responsibility carried by Germany as a resul
Source: Times (UK)
Jan 24, 2008
A leading historian of science is to become the new head of the Government’s fertility watchdog.
Lisa Jardine, Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London, will take over as the chairwoman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) on April 1, the Government’s Appointments Commission announced yesterday. Professor Jardine, whose specialist fields of study include the history of the scientific revolution, succeeds Shirley Harrison, w
Source: NYT
Jan 24, 2008
Miles Lerman, a Jewish resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Poland who was a major figure in creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and persuading Soviet bloc countries to give it thousands of artifacts of the Holocaust, died on Tuesday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 88.
The death was confirmed by his daughter, Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer.
Mr. Lerman was chairman of the museum’s governing council from the time it opened on the Mall on April
Source: National Security Archive
Jan 24, 2008
The new documentary "Secrecy," made by Harvard professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss, premiered this past week at the Sundance Film Festival, featuring National Security Archive director Tom Blanton in a leading role and on the after-show panels answering questions from Sundance audiences.
Blanton participated in the premiere showing on January 18 in Park City, the follow-up showing on January 19 also in Park City, and the noontime showing on Sunday January 20 at the scr
Source: Harold Henderson in a profile of Perlstein in the Chicago Reader
Jan 24, 2008
In Before the Storm, the 2001 history that made his reputation, Rick Perlstein put his readers inside the skin of a pimply college freshman cast adrift on a sprawling concrete campus in the 1960s. “Wearied from his first soul-crushing run-in with Big Bureaucracy,” the imagined student is buying his required texts in the campus bookstore when he happens on a slim book with big type. He flips it open and “standing, reads fourteen short pages inviting him to join an idealistic struggle to defend th
Source: Eric Hobsbawm in the London Review of Books
Jan 24, 2008
I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German interview under the title ‘Ich bin ein Reiseführer in die Geschichte’ (‘I am a travel guide to history’). Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the survivors of the school I went to when I came to Britain, the no longer extant St Marylebone Grammar School, I tried to explain the reactions
Source: St. Petersburg Times
Jan 23, 2008
Associate history professor Matt Childs needs to spend another four to six months in Cuba to finish his second book on the country's slave history, but Florida's 2-year-old ban on research travel to the communist country prevents him from going.
He has received just one merit raise in his six years at Florida State University. He's married with one toddler, and another baby and endless bills on the way.
So when the University of South Carolina recently came calling, Chi
Source: News Release--OAH
Jan 23, 2008
SPECIAL ISSUE: Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue?
Guest Editors: Lawrence N. Powell and Clarence L. Mohr
This special issue grew out of a multidisciplinary conference held in March 2007. The issue and the conference were created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to examine the history and culture of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. Because we are so little removed in time from Katrina's 2005 landfall, the essays cannot, and do not, fully historic
Source: AP
Jan 23, 2008
The newly released Polish edition of a book by a Princeton University professor has dredged up painful memories in Poland, forcing the country to confront a difficult chapter in its history: the deaths of Jews at the hands of Poles in the aftermath of World War II.
Jan T. Gross' "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz" hit bookstores in Poland earlier this month, and has sparked a debate about anti-Semitism in this Eastern European country, which saw its Jewish popu
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jan 23, 2008
The Committee on Social Thought, a center of interdisciplinary research at the University of Chicago since 1941, often is associated with such eminent former members as Hannah Arendt, Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, J.M. Coetzee, T.S. Eliot, Friederich Hayek, Edward Levi and Mark Strand. Now, new recognition is coming to John Nef, the late historian who was the driving force behind the committee's founding and its steadfast financial backer.
U. of C. said it is naming the committee after
Source: Fox News
Jan 23, 2008
The Church of Scientology slammed a German tabloid for publishing comments by an esteemed German historian comparing Tom Cruise to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, according to thisislondon.co.uk.
"Bild am Sonntag is grossly irresponsible for publishing horrendous and disgraceful claims about Mr. Cruise," said Karin Pouw, the church's public affairs director, according to thisislondon.co.uk.
World War II historian Guido Knopp was commenting on a video
