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: Walter Russell Mead in Foreign Affairs (Nov-Dec.)
Nov 1, 2007
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt claim that they want The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy "to foster a more clear-eyed and candid discussion of this subject." Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. "The Israel Lobby" will harden and freeze positions rather than open them up. It will delay rather than hasten the development of new U.S. policies in the Middle East. It will confuse the policy debate not just in the United States but throughout the world as well, while
Source: Vanity Fair
Nov 1, 2007
July 19, 1959. Hyannis Port. Jackie Kennedy was the only other person present; and we all drank and talked from about 8 to 12:30.… [Jackie] was lovely but seemed excessively flighty on politics, asking with wide-eyed naïveté questions like: "Jack, why don't you just tell them that you won't go into any of those old primaries?" Jack was in a benign frame of mind and did not blink; but clearly such remarks could, in another context, be irritating. This is all the more so since Jackie, on
Source: http://www.aaanet.org/blog
Oct 31, 2007
The American Anthropological Association’s Executive Board recently passed a Statement regarding ethical aspects of the U.S. Military’s Human Terrain System (HTS) project. The project, which has received widespread national and international media coverage, embeds anthropologists and other social scientists in military teams in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Ethical and procedural concerns regarding anthropologists working with U.S. Military and Intelligence agencies have been under investig
Source: http://newsnet.byu.edu
Oct 31, 2007
Utah State University anthropologist and historian, Joseph Tainter spoke on Tuesday about energy gain and issues dealing with our future energy.
Tainter discussed the immediate future of energy in our uses of oil. He said that half of the oil consumed by the human race was used since 1984.
Tainter began by showing several examples of energy and energy yields. He discussed ants in South America as well as the Roman Empire to compare the effects on society during changes
Source: http://www.udel.edu
Oct 31, 2007
Although the terms insurgency and counterinsurgency turn up in news headlines from around the world on a daily basis, these struggles appear to be as old as civilization itself, according to a noted UD expert on military history.
“Guerrilla warfare is as old as recorded history and is a more widespread and reoccurring form of warfare than the organized clash of armies,” Raymond Callahan, UD professor emeritus of history, said during a talk on Oct. 19, in Arsht Hall, on the Universit
Source: http://www.cdispatch.com
Oct 31, 2007
Dr. Richard Guy Wilson, architectural historian at the University of Virginia, will deliver the opening presentation Friday night for the Columbus Historic Foundation's 37th annual Decorative Arts and Preservation Forum.
Wilson, who holds the Commonwealth Professor's Chair in Architectural History at the University of Virginia, will speak on “What $$$$$ Can Buy: The American Palace Race” at 7:30 p.m. Friday in Rose and Thad Cochran Hall on the Mississippi University for Women campus
Source: http://www.murfreesboropost.com
Oct 31, 2007
In 1958, in a sweltering, converted torpedo factory in Alexandria, Va., historian Gerhard L. Weinberg was combing through massive stacks of documents that the U.S. had captured from Nazi Germany – and came across an unknown prize – a secret book dictated by Adolf Hitler in 1928, the unpublished sequel to Mein Kampf.
It was this book that became the subject of the History Channel’s acclaimed 2004 documentary titled “Hitler’s Lost Plan.” This documentary will be shown at 2 p.m. on Wed
Source: http://www.delawareonline.com
Oct 30, 2007
If the U.S. government decided to pay reparations to black Americans for centuries of slavery and the economic disparities that followed, historian John Hope Franklin would "never touch one of those pieces of silver."
However, Franklin told a rapt audience Monday at Delaware State University, black Americans are holders of a promissory note that has not been honored.
"This country needs to take note of the fact that its wealth was not made exclusively by
Source: Stanford Daily
Oct 30, 2007
The introduction at last night’s Presidential Lecture was inspirational, to say the least.
“Libraries are indeed mobbed, and there is commotion across the media, but Simon Schama has come to the rescue,” said History Department Chair Aron Rodrigue as he introduced the night’s speaker to a standing-room-only Cubberley Auditorium.
Schama, a professor of Art History and History at Columbia University, spoke on the history of the slave trade in a lecture entitled, “The Abol
Source: Altercation (Blog)
Oct 30, 2007
Arianna is profiled, quite favorably, in Fortune this week, here. And yet, in the piece, I read the following accusation by Alan Dershowitz:
At the same time, she does not promise that what is submitted will always run, a fact that has drawn the ire of Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz. He became a regular contributor last year, but claims Huffington's editors started vetting his posts and then refused to run a column he submitted recently because it conflicted with
Source: Frederick Smoler in American Heritage
Oct 30, 2007
Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, is what is nowadays called a public intellectual, which means someone who writes and talks about big issues, and not only on college campuses. He teaches American foreign policy as a visiting professor at Bard College and writes books on that subject. He has just published a new one, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Knopf, 464 pages, $27.95), a
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Oct 30, 2007
"If you talk about an influential set of interest groups that is mostly though not exclusively comprised of Jewish Americans, some may think you are saying that there is some kind of secret conspiracy to control U.S. foreign policy," says Stephen M. Walt, gazing at the more than 500 people who have pressed into the narrow aisles of a Washington bookstore on this sweltering September night. "Anybody who raises this issue is virtually certain to be accused of being anti-Semitic.&quo
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 30, 2007
Most Battle of Britain pilots were so badly trained they could not shoot straight, according to new research.
Some went into combat after just 10 hours of solo flying and without ever having fired their guns. Lack of training facilities, time and recruits severely hampered Fighter Command's efforts in the air, claims historian Andrew Cumming.
Historical documents show the "kill/loss ratio" for the key air battle between 24 Aug 24 and September 6, 1940 was &quo
Source: Bob Bateman in his ongoing dissection of the work of Victor Davis Hanson on the left-wing blog, Altercation
Oct 29, 2007
[Robert Bateman is an author, historian and Army infantry officer. He was stationed in Iraq from January 2005 until February 2006. His most recent book is "No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident."]
... [Victor Davis] Hanson's basic contention
is that face-to-face infantry battle is a cultural legacy exclusive to the"West." In Carnage and Culture, he sets out to
demonstrate this by resurrecting the hoary old 19
Source: http://media.www.dukechronicle.com
Oct 29, 2007
John Hope Franklin and Romila Thapar treated students, professors and community members to an in-depth discussion on the role of historians in social and cultural change at the Divinity School's Goodson Chapel Saturday.
Franklin, James B. Duke professor emeritus of history, and Thapar, professor emeritus of history at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, India, discussed the evolution of the study of history in front of a packed audience Saturday afternoon. The talk-"The
Source: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com
Oct 29, 2007
The Boardwalk's Cave Train has its fans and its foes.
But few in either camp have ever thought of the kitschy, campy ride in socio-political terms.
Not so Dana Frank, a regular visitor to the Boardwalk in the '60s when her family made trips to the seashore from Los Altos.
A professor in the American Studies and History Departments at UC Santa Cruz, Frank is a professional historian, focused mainly on labor, women, trade and consumer politics.
E
Source: Jill Lepore in the New Yorker
Oct 29, 2007
... Daniel Walker Howe’s ambitious new book, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848” (Oxford; $35), chronicles every development that Thoreau despised, many that he admired, and a great deal about which the man in Walden’s woods cared not one whit. Between 1815 and 1848, the United States chased its Manifest Destiny all the way to the Pacific; battled Mexico; built thousands of miles of canals, railroads, and telegraph lines; embraced universal white-male suffrage and p
Source: Stephen Holmes in the Nation
Oct 29, 2007
[Stephen Holmes teaches at New York University School of Law. His latest book is The Matador's Cape: America's Reckless Response to Terror.]
Is there anything historically unprecedented about the Bush Administration's military adventurism, intense secrecy and fearmongering? This question is vexing, especially to those historians and political scientists who, however appalled by current US foreign policy, cannot be genuinely surprised by the most recent incarnation of an imperial presiden
Source: LAT
Oct 28, 2007
IN the beginning, before blogs, there was Studs Terkel, who, more than anyone else in what Time-Life founder Henry Luce called the American Century, gave the great mass of Americans who were not Henry Luce a way to be heard. "I have, after a fashion, been celebrated for having celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us; for lending voice to the face in the crowd," Terkel, now 95, writes in "Touch and Go," his new memoir. In a dozen books of oral history, including &quo
Source: Jonathan Dresner in Froginawell (Blog)
Oct 28, 2007
This could be a very interesting year for the job market, not to mention for Asian history blogging. I know of three Asian history bloggers on the hunt for new jobs this year: none of them have started blogging about the experience, but I’d like to invite them — or any other blogger with an eye on the lists — to start, at least a little bit.1
It’s always been a bit of a curiousity to me that there isn’t more discussion on the blogs or listservs of the state of the market. Faculty wi
