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: Cinnamon Stillwell at CampusWatch
Nov 12, 2007
Earlier this year, the Center for Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. It was founded in 1957 by Gustave E. Von Grunebaum, a scholar at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute and the first president of the Middle East Studies Association. Grunebaum sought to establish at UCLA a groundbreaking Middle East and Islamic Studies program featuring an array of experts in languages, culture, and history.
Unfortunately, the
Source: Email to HNN from an assistant editor at Lapham's Quarterly
Nov 12, 2007
I'm an assistant editor at Lapham's Quarterly, a new history magazine started by Lewis Lapham, the editor of Harper's for many years. We're launching our first issue tomorrow, entitled "States of War," and it will be available on newsstands across the country, including Barnes & Noble and Borders. The issue includes both historical texts (ranging from Thucydides to Jessica Lynch) and contemporary commentary from Fritz Stern, Caleb Carr, Tom Holland, and John Mueller. By connecting
Source: Oliver Kamm at his blog
Nov 11, 2007
When taking his leave of The Nation in 2002, its longstanding columnist Christopher Hitchens remarked that the magazine was"becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden". This was altogether too kind, I feel: the magazine has nothing like so reasoned a message. Take The Nation's"Liberal Media" columnist,
Source: http://www.heraldtribune.com
Nov 11, 2007
Before the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, Dr. Walid Phares had spent two decades studying the politics and ideologies of the Middle East and feeling like "a voice in the wilderness" with his urgent warnings about the dangers posed to Western societies by the ideology of jihad.
"I was certainly more frustrated and depressed before" Sept. 11, 2001, he said. "That ended because of the drama of 9/11. So from 9/11 on, my frustration has chan
Source: Deborah Solomon in the NYT Magazine in her regular weekly feature interview
Nov 11, 2007
As a professor of American history at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the chairwoman of the school’s Center of the American West, what do you make of the flurry of new films that revisit Jesse James and the town of Yuma and the empty space of the desert landscape?
Just as we had an upsurge in difficult westerns when we were struggling with Vietnam, now we’re struggling with Iraq, and so we are having the same upsurge.Right. Westernsare useful in wartime be
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Nov 11, 2007
Algis Ratnikas lives in one of the little boxes on a hilltop in Daly City. But he's not like the others in his row. Every day Ratnikas, 60, sits at the computers that have taken over his dining room, entering data into the Timelines of History.
"Timelines of History starts from the Big Bang and continues to the present. It's all on the Web site www.timelines.ws. I get about 8,000 hits per week. There are tens of thousands of entries. The un
Source: Guardian
Nov 10, 2007
Mary Beard vividly remembers a day in her first year at Newnham College, Cambridge, when one of her friends saw a marked essay lying on her desk. He picked it up and read the tutor's comment: "This is very good; I think it would get a first." "You," he spluttered, "get a first?" "Even in the mid-70s," Beard recalls, there were "lots of men who thought that women were destined only to get 2:1s." Besides, she was studying classics, a typically male
Source: Globe & Mail
Nov 10, 2007
In 1938, the first volume of A. F. Duguid's planned 11-volume history of the Canadian forces in the First World War dropped like an artillery shell on the desks of Canada's book reviewers. They were appropriately impressed by the detail and the accompanying volume of appendices (which answered such burning questions as "what was the daily beet ration for animals of Lord Strathcona's Horse in December, 1914?"), and one even suggested that Duguid covered the subject so exhaustively that
Source: Toronto Globe & Mail
Nov 10, 2007
When historian Giles MacDonogh submitted the 600-page manuscript for his book After the Reich this year, he thought that he had written a comprehensive history of Germany in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Instead, he has realized in recent weeks that what he has written is a book about Iraq.
While his book doesn't say a word about Iraq or the Middle East and focuses rather heavily on the minutiae of daily life in Bavaria and Saxony, he has discovered, as have many other authors of
Source: http://www.pantagraph.com
Nov 9, 2007
Racism is alive in the United States, and fighting it is as hard as battling terrorism, said a scholar who spoke Thursday on slavery, its role in Illinois and its aftermath.
“The latest challenge we face as a nation … is the return of overt bigotry and racial hatred,” said Edna Greene Medford, an associate professor at Howard University. “But as a nation we have comforted ourselves by dismissing it as an individual indiscretion, not a national fault.”
The noted historia
Source: http://www.jta.org
Nov 9, 2007
The Jewish Museum in Berlin will give its annual prize to a former German chancellor and a German-American historian.
The prize for understanding and tolerance will be presented to Helmut Kohl and historian Fritz Stern in the museum's new glass-enclosed courtyard on Nov. 17. Former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Holbrooke will take part in the ceremony.
Kohl is to be recognized for making the relationship between Israel and Germany a cornerstone of German foreign po
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Nov 9, 2007
Among American world's fairs there have been two standouts. Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, besides introducing the Ferris Wheel, Cracker Jack, and alternating current, radically changed the course of American architecture, dooming the idiosyncratic styles of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright and inspiring a seemingly endless procession of neoclassical buildings — libraries, museums, banks, even office towers. New York's 1939 World's Fair, with its "World of Tomorrow"
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at CampusWatch
Nov 8, 2007
After a contentious two-year campaign waged by the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) and other supporters, a mural dedicated to the late Columbia University English and comparative literature professor Edward Said was unveiled at San Francisco State University (SFSU) last week.
Former SFSU Arabic professor Fayeq Oweis – now teaching the same subject at Santa Clara University – was the lead artist for what's been labeled the "Palestinian Cultural Mural." The mura
Source: Joseph Lelyveld in the NY Review of Books
Nov 8, 2007
The first volume of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.'s memoirs, A Life in the Twentieth Century,[1] didn't exactly race through his early years. When it ended at the century's midpoint on page 523, its hero was thirty-three. The justification for all those pages was in the good-humored and reflective telling, his passion for witnessing history as well as writing it, and its unusually large cast of characters. The young historian may not have known everyone who counted politically and intellectually in
Source: Ascribe
Nov 7, 2007
For more than a century, voting machines have helped shape American political history.
The chaos of the 2000 presidential election in Florida demonstrated the crucial role that voting machines played in shaping the outcome of that election. But Bryan Pfaffenberger believes there is value in understanding that the interaction between technology and culture has been going on for more than a century.
Pfaffenberger, a historian of science and an associate pr
Source: Zmag
Nov 7, 2007
Jeffery R. Webber caught up with New York University historian Sinclair Thomson on September 7, 2007 in Montreal to discuss indigenous and popular politics in Bolivia and the character of the Evo Morales government. The interview was also an opportunity to learn about some of the theses advanced in the new book Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso, 2007), which Thomson co-authored with Forrest Hylton.
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JRW: In a 2005 New Left Review ar
Source: Independent (UK)
Nov 7, 2007
Norbert Casper Loewenstein (Norbert Lynton); art historian and arts administrator: born Berlin 22 September 1927; Lecturer in History of Art and Architecture, Leeds College of Art 1950-61; Senior Lecturer, then Head of Department of Art History and General Studies, Chelsea School of Art 1961-70; London Correspondent, Art International 1961-66; Art Critic, The Guardian 1965-70; Director of Exhibitions, Arts Council of Great Britain 1970-75; Professor of the History of Art, Sussex University 1975-
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Nov 7, 2007
Citing a pattern of outside interest groups aggressively seeking to impose their influence on recent collegiate hiring and tenure decisions, five prominent professors [including Princeton historian Joan Wallach Scott] have formed the Ad Hoc Committee to Defend the University. They are circulating an online petition that takes explicit aim at "groups portraying themselves as defenders of Israel," which, the committee alleges, are disseminating "unfounded insinuations and allegation
Source: http://www.register-mail.com/
Nov 6, 2007
One way to make history interesting is to provide visual clues to reinforce what is said or read.
Junius Rodriguez, associate professor of history at Eureka College, did just that during his recent lecture in Canton on "Liberty Lines: The Underground Railroad in Central Illinois."
Reaching into a small bag, he produced a chain to be worn about the neck of a slave. It was used to secure slaves, and often linked several of them together. This was done, Rodriguez said,
Source: http://www.dailypress.com
Nov 6, 2007
HAMPTON — - The Newport News historian who has been with the city for decades plans to retire Nov. 30 and take on a similar role in Hampton for $120,000 a year.
Hampton's City Council will vote Wednesday on hiring John V. Quarstein, 54, to be director of Hampton's history, City Manager Jesse Wallace said. The city is offering a contract of $10,000 a month for five years with the option to extend it another five years, Wallace said.
The contract includes a $10,000 lump s
