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.normantranscript.com/
Nov 6, 2007
Historians often judge presidents differently than their contemporary public, and presidents would do well to learn from history, presidential historian Michael Beschloss told University of Oklahoma students Monday evening.
He and OU President David Boren led an informal discussion with about 100 OU students at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 555 Elm Ave.
One of the key roles of a historian is to hold current presidents accountable not to repeat history's mistakes, Be
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
Nov 5, 2007
The federal government is inviting comments (at http://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/documents/20071026.htm) on policies that lead to the intrusion of institutional review boards (IRBs) into oral history research. This provides a rare opportunity for members of our profession to register their objections. I urge every historian who conducts oral history, or is responsible for students who use oral history methods, to respond to this request and ex
Source: H-GERMAN@H-NET.MSU.EDU
Nov 5, 2007
On November 1, 2007, Professor Gerald Feldman, of the Department of
History at the University of California, Berkeley died at the age of
seventy his home in Berkeley following a protracted battle with cancer.
Gerald Feldman's death is a great loss for the international
historical profession, for his friends and colleagues at the
University of California, Berkeley and for his many colleagues and
friends here in Germany where he was a frequent visitor. He was one of
the preeminent hist
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Nov 5, 2007
In one of the most publicly contested tenure cases of the year, Barnard College announced Friday that it would promote Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropologist whose work on archaeology in Israel led to a major campaign against her.
A statement released by the college did not directly speak to the controversy that has raged around Abu El-Haj. “Like all tenured members of the Barnard faculty, Professor Abu El-Haj has successfully passed a highly rigorous review that involves both Barnard’
Source: Weekly Standard
Nov 5, 2007
America has won an important battle in the war on terror. We turned an imminent victory for Al Qaeda In Iraq into a humiliating defeat for them and thereby created an opportunity for further progress not only in Iraq, but also in the global struggle. In the past five months, terrorist operations in and around Baghdad have dropped by 59 percent. Car bomb deaths are down by 81 percent. Casualties from enemy attacks dropped 77 percent. And violence during the just-completed season of Ramadan--tradi
Source: Christopher Phelps in the Nation
Nov 5, 2007
[Christopher Phelps, who teaches history at Ohio State University, Mansfield, is the author of Young Sidney Hook: Marxist and Pragmatist (University of Michigan).]
When mourners filled Saint Peter's Church in Manhattan on October 16, 2003, to commemorate the life of Herbert Aptheker, the Marxist historian of slavery who died at 87, they did not lack for panegyrics. Eulogists celebrated Aptheker's commitment to interracial equality. They deplored the cold war stigma that precluded hi
Source: AHA Blog
Nov 4, 2007
On Tuesday of last week, October 30th, the National Park Service and National Trust for Historic Preservation held a reception to honor and recognize two new additions to the National Park Service team: Robert K. Sutton, chief historian; and Daniel Odess, assistant associate director, Park Cultural Resources.
NPS Director Mary A. Bomar addressed the crowd, introducing both Sutton and Odess, and then went on to express her vision of the future mission of the National Park Service. Sh
Source: Letters to the Editor of the NYT Book Review
Nov 4, 2007
To the Editor:
Your reviewer, the historian David Kennedy, trashes my friend and colleague Paul Krugman’s new book, “The Conscience of a Liberal” (Oct. 21), as “factually shaky” on the basis of two alleged humiliating mistakes. According to Kennedy, Krugman says that the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1964 and claims, contrary to what is “customarily” thought, that Kansas was the birthplace of Prohibition. The book does slip at one point — possibly mixing up the Civil Rights Act o
Source: WaPo
Nov 4, 2007
The great China historian Jonathan Spence has for years guided us on journeys into the worldviews and dreams of emperors and rebels, traitors and traders, mandarins and missionaries. Now, in Return to Dragon Mountain, Spence takes us inside the mind of a fellow historian, albeit one who lived more than three centuries ago.
The Ming dynasty is known for great achievements in scholarship, arts and culture. Historian Zhang Dai's long life, which began in 1597 and ended around 1680, spa
Source: Scotsman
Nov 3, 2007
AN exhibition on the archive of best-selling writer Cornelius Ryan - author of A Bridge Too Far and The Longest Day - starts next weekend.
It is part of a weekend of events organised by Edinburgh University's centre for the study of the two world wars to mark Remembrance Sunday.
The archive is one of the largest collections of first-hand information outside of government archives on D-Day, Arnhem and the Fall of Berlin.
The exhibition will feature previousl
Source: Jewish News Weekly of Northern California
Nov 2, 2007
Daniel Pipes loves Arab cuisine, Arab literature and the Arabic language. When working in his Philadelphia office, he often plays Arab music in the background.
That's about as far as he goes.
Otherwise, the soft-spoken Harvard Ph.D. and Middle East pundit is hard-pressed to speak well of the Arab world, at least when it comes to politics. Israel, he says, is at war with Arab enemies and "when a war takes place, you should try to win. Wars are resolved not through n
Source: International Herald Tribune
Nov 2, 2007
'Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" Hitler supposedly said on Aug. 22, 1939, as he prepared his henchmen for the savagery of race war and the slaughter of the Jews of Europe. In many ways, this link between the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis from 1941 to 1945 brings together the elements of Alan Kramer's important book, "Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World
Source: Justin Elliott at the Mother Jones blog
Nov 2, 2007
A small group of Middle East studies academics, led by Bernard Lewis, have formed a new professional group, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, according to InsideHigherEd. Their stated reasons for establishing the group are"the increasing politicization of these fields, and the cer
Source: Columbia Spectator
Nov 2, 2007
Controversial Barnard professor Nadia Abu El-Haj has received tenure, according to an e-mail sent by a departmental administrator to the anthropology listserv on Thursday.
“Here is the good news: Professor Nadia Abu El-Haj is now a tenured member of the Barnard and Columbia Anthropology Departments,” academic departmental administrator Xiomara Perez-Betances wrote in the e-mail. The e-mail provided no further information.
Apart from the e-mail, Spectator was unable to indepen
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Nov 2, 2007
Seeking to change the direction of Middle Eastern and African studies, a new scholarly organization was
announced Thursday — with some big name scholars on board and some tough criticism for the discipline. The biggest scholarly names in the new group, Bernard Lewis of Princeton University and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University, are associated with support for the Bush administration’s view of the Middle East, a decid
Source: Rachel Maines in the OAH Newsletter
Nov 1, 2007
It took twelve years of research and writing to turn a thin and highly speculative manuscript with the working title of The Vibrator and its Predecessor Technologies into the Johns Hopkins University Press book The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. It took another seven and half years, and more than $150,000, for award-winning documentary filmmakers Wendy Slick and Emiko Omori to turn it into a feature-length film, Passion and Power, that p
Source: Robert Shaffer in the OAH Newsletter
Nov 1, 2007
One of the most striking statements in Alan Greenspan's recently published memoirs is that he is "saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil" (1). The passage is significant for historians and other scholars, of course, in legitimating a discussion of the economic motives of U.S. interactions with the world; after all, if the longtime chair of the Federal Reserve admits that control over resources is a key motive o
Source: Robert Townsend in Perspectives, the magazine of the AHA
Nov 1, 2007
The number of new history bachelor's degrees reached the highest level in 30 years in 2004–05, as the nation's colleges and universities conferred 31,398 degrees. This marked an increase of 5.3 percent over the previous year.
History easily surpassed the average growth among all disciplines, where the number of new undergraduate degrees increased by just 2.8 percent. In relative terms, history degrees now account for 2.18 percent of the baccalaureate degrees conferred (Figure 1). Th
Source: Robert Townsend in Perspectives, the magazine of the AHA
Nov 1, 2007
The average salary for historians in academia lags well behind that of other disciplines, even when the health sciences are excluded. The average salary for historians at all ranks was $59,619—almost 8 percent below the average reported for all fields of $64,743.
According to the College and University Personnel Association–Human Resources (CUPA–HR), there was only a small gap between the average salaries for historians at private and public colleges and universities. Historians at
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 1, 2007
A Vatican-backed historian has attacked the film Elizabeth: The Golden Age as a “distorted anti-papal travesty” that risks dividing the West just when it should be rediscovering its “common Christian roots” in the face of Islam.
Writing in Avvenire, the official organ of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Franco Cardini said that the film formed part of a “concerted attack on Catholicism” by atheists and “apocalyptic Christians”.
Professor Cardini, who holds the chair of
