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.thejc.com
Dec 12, 2007
Spanish police were this week examining a recording of a speech by revisionist historian David Irving, condemned by a British High Court judge as a Holocaust denier, after the Jewish community failed to have him banned from speaking in Barcelona.
Under Spanish law, justifying genocide or inciting racism and xenophobia can carry a sentence of up to three years. Police were authorised by a judge to examine Irving’s words to see if he had broken the law in his speech at a bookshop last
Source: VOA
Dec 12, 2007
Now, we continue our discussion from last week about the pay for professors in the United States. We looked at the averages. Today we narrow that to one example.
Andrew McMichael is a young history professor in his sixth year at Western Kentucky University, a state school in Bowling Green. He started as an assistant professor, teaching seven courses a year.
His starting pay was forty-three thousand dollars, plus benefits. These included health insurance for himself and
Source: Bloomberg News
Dec 12, 2007
Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan ignored warnings about the Fed's low interest rates that fueled real estate speculation and the current housing recession, said Allan Meltzer, professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
"I think he lets himself off much too easy,'' said Meltzer, author of a 2002 book on the early history of the central bank, in an interview. "He acknowledged maybe his policy had a little bit to do with it. But
Source: Boston Globe
Dec 12, 2007
Just a few years after becoming a classics professor, Zeph Stewart sent a letter to Harvard's student newspaper in 1957 praising a colleague who would soon retire. It was not a mash note crafted to curry favor with the lords of the academic manor.
"I need not dwell on his years of service in this community, but prefer to speak of the good fortune of the University in having in its janitorial staff a person who has contributed so much to the Harvard education of so many young me
Source: NY Observer
Dec 12, 2007
Last week, New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced in a staff memo that the editor of the paper’s Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus, would also head up the Week in Review section.
Some reacted to the appointment of Mr. Tanenhaus at Week in Review—where he replaces Katherine Roberts, who’ll move to a senior editorial job at NYTimes.com—with concerns that the quality of the Book Review could decline as its top editor is pulled in two directions. The move comes at a time when ma
Source: George Packer at the New Yorker blog
Dec 11, 2007
A curious piece of trivia embedded in the eight-hundred-plus pages of Arthur Schlesinger., Jr.,’s “Journals”: Jimmy Carter so repelled this Democratic fixture that he left his ballot blank in 1976 and voted for the hopeless independent candidacy of John Anderson in 1980, having decided that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t be that bad. “Had Ford been reëlected in 1976,” Schlesinger wrote in August, 1980, “we would have had the Panama Canal Treaties without trauma, SALT II would have passed, domestic polic
Source: George Galt, Literary Review Of Canada in the National Post
Dec 11, 2007
Conrad Black has been sentenced to six-and-a-half years in a U.S. prison. In the wake of his sentence, the talk around the nation's water coolers understandably surrounds the man's life in business -- and the misdeed he committed to earn this jail time. Yet Canadians would do well to remember that the man headed to jail is also an accomplished author. His reputation as such preceded his rise to corporate power -- and it will likewise survive his fall.
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Armed with his
Source: LiveScience
Dec 11, 2007
The translation of the Bible into English marked the birth of religious fundamentalism in medieval times, as well as the persecution that often comes with radical adherence in any era, according to a new book.
The 16th-century English Reformation, the historic period during which the Scriptures first became widely available in a common tongue, is often hailed by scholars as a moment of liberation for the general public, as it no longer needed to rely solely on the clergy to interpre
Source: Buffalo News
Dec 11, 2007
Andrew J. Smitherman was a crusading newspaperman for the black community in Tulsa, Okla., before he was indicted on charges of inciting a deadly race riot in 1921, and moved to Buffalo.
Only now — 46 years after his death — is Smitherman getting some vindication.
During a ceremonial court hearing scheduled for today in Tulsa, the indictment filed against Smitherman 86 years ago will be dismissed, thanks to an enterprising historian at the University at Buffalo.
Source: Variety
Dec 11, 2007
Production is finally set to begin on a long-delayed TV version of Howard Zinn’s landmark 1980 tome “A People’s History of the United States.”The four-hour documentary miniseries — titled “The People Speak” — will include performances by Matt Damon, Marisa Tomei, Viggo Mortensen, Danny Glover, Josh Brolin, David Strathairn, Kerry Washington, Eddie Vedder and John Legend.
Zinn will host the longform project, which begins shooting next month in Boston. Project, to be exec produced by
Source: CNN
Dec 11, 2007
Hillary Clinton had a question when Tom Brokaw told her he was working on a book on the 1960s.
"Have you cracked the code yet?" she asked.
Such is the legacy of that exuberant, violent, messy decade, a time in which American social and political leaders were shot to death, youth did battle with adults literally and figuratively, and a war 6,000 miles away divided the country in ways that continue to resonate more than 40 years later....
Source: NYT
Dec 11, 2007
[Black is the author of a biography of FDR.]
In the months since his convictions in July on fraud and obstruction of justice charges, Conrad M. Black, the fallen press baron who once presided over the world’s third-largest newspaper empire, was not above poking fun at himself as he waited to see how long he would spend in prison.
He received his answer Monday as Judge Amy J. St. Eve of United States District Court sentenced Mr. Black to 6 1/2 years in prison on three f
Source: Wayne Hoffman, email sent to HNN
Dec 11, 2007
Gay historian Allan Berube, award-winning author of Coming Out Under Fire,
died on December 11, 2007. He was 61.
His death was due to sudden complications following the discovery of two
stomach ulcers, according to his close friend Jonathan Ned Katz, a fellow
gay historian.
Berube was, for decades, an independent historian and community activist.
He first came to progressive political activism in opposition to the
Vietnam war, working with the American Friends Service Committee
Source: John Earl Haynes in a review published in Washington DeCoded.
Dec 11, 2007
[John Earl Haynes, a member of Washington DeCoded’s editorial board, is the author (together with Harvey Klehr) of Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials That Shaped American Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2006).]
Eight years after Arthur Herman, here comes Stan Evans with another effort to pull off what most historians would regard as a Herculean (if not Sisyphean) task: the rehabilitation of Joe McCarthy.
As did his predecessor, Evans does an excellent
Source: Christopher Benfey in the New Republic
Dec 10, 2007
Edmund Wilson, a man of idiosyncratic temperament and unpredictable taste, has solidified in retrospect into a marmoreal figure, a sort of jowly Supreme Court justice of the literary imagination, issuing measured opinions from the chambers, successively, of The New Republic, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. In achieving something like the "consecrated authoritative role" that he ascribed to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the culminating chapter of Patriotic Gore, his
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Dec 10, 2007
[O]nly 15 months ago, Trillwing at The Clutter Museum complained that she couldn't find women blogging about history on the net. I thought then that she simply hadn't found them. Now, thanks to Jon Dresner, we have a new category, Women's History, on
Source: Independent (UK)
Dec 10, 2007
Richard Milne Hogg, historian of the English language: born Edinburgh 20 May 1944; Lecturer in English Language, University of Amsterdam 1969-73; Lecturer in English Language, Lancaster University 1973-80; Smith Professor of English Language and Medieval Literature, Manchester University 1980-2007; General Editor, Cambridge History of the English Language 1992-2001; FBA 1994; married 1969 Margaret White (two sons); died Manchester 6 September 2007.
Richard Hogg, a world-renowned spe
Source: Bruce Cole, head of the NEH, at the NEH website
Dec 10, 2007
Journalist Andrew Ferguson is widely admired as a writer's writer. Over the years, in magazines from The Weekly Standard to Reader's Digest to Time and beyond, he has proven himself to be one of the few genuine stylists in American journalism and one of the wisest, funniest writers around. No less an authority on humor and good prose than Christopher Buckley said Ferguson “just may be the best writer of his generation.” Ferguson's recent book, Land of Lincoln, “a hilarious, offbeat tour of Linco
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT
Dec 10, 2007
Egypt, Herodotus tells us in “The Histories,” is a land with “more marvels and monuments that defy description than any other.” Not only is the Nile unlike any other river in the world, overflowing its banks in summer not in the early spring, but Egypt’s inhabitants also have “manners and customs” that in most ways are “completely opposite to those of other peoples.” Women go to the marketplace to sell goods, while men stay home to weave cloth; men carry loads on their heads, while women bear th
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Dec 10, 2007
David S. Katz’s academic subfield is ambitious — and sparsely populated. How many other Jewish scholars, let alone retired Israeli military captains, make a second academic home for themselves in the educational heartland of one of the world’s most populous Muslim countries in order to teach Christianity?
Katz, an Oxford-trained director of the Lessing Institute for European History and Civilization at Tel Aviv University (where he also teaches Christianity to some Jewish students),
