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: UC Berkeley News
May 8, 2007
A high-spirited multi-generational crowd — bearing camera phones, hot-flash hand fans, and balloons scrawled with messages of affection — packed Wheeler Auditorium Monday morning for one last Leon Litwack lecture.
"He's got a great narrative style" and a "compelling story," noted Branden Little, a former graduate-student assistant to Professor Litwack among the sea of undergrads, press photographers, family members, former students, and garden-variety well-wisher
Source: NYT
May 8, 2007
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, were the guests of honor Monday at a state dinner at the White House.
Following is a guest list, as provided by the office of the first lady.
President Bush and Laura Bush.
Vice President Dick Cheney and Lynne V. Cheney.
Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip.
Cmdr. Heber Ackland, Royal Navy, equerry-in-waiting to the queen.
The Countess of Air
Source: Press Release -- National Archives
May 8, 2007
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein will host an "American Conversation" with Dr. Cathy Gorn, executive director of National History Day, on Wednesday, June 13, at 3 p.m. They will discuss the growth and significance of National History Day, the annual competition which inspires the teaching and learning of history. The National Archives provides active support to National History Day.
Dr. Cathy Gorn is executive director of National History Day and adjunct prof
Source: Gary Kamiya at Salon.com
May 8, 2007
Sir Alistair Horne may be the only author in the world whose books have been read and praised by George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon and Robert Fisk. Not to mention by much of the senior military staff of the U.S. Army, Middle East scholars, State Department policy wonks, and realpolitik statesmen. The distinguished British historian, author of 18 books, became the talk of the U.S. chattering classes when it was revealed that President Bush was reading his classic account of the 1954-1962 Algerian War,
Source: Soledad O'Brien, author of the entry on Faust
May 7, 2007
[O'Brien is special correspondent for CNN: Special Investigations Unit.]
I come from a Harvard family—no, there's no O'Brien Library, but every kid in my family (there are six of us) got a degree from Harvard College or Harvard Law School or Harvard Medical School. As first-generation Americans, we were firmly middle class: good students who aced our SATs and took out loans to pay for the privilege of a first-rate education. But when I was a freshman, my sister, who was in her junio
Source: Scrapbook in the Weekly Standard
May 7, 2007
THE SCRAPBOOK was pleased the other morning when two paperback volumes crossed our desk, courtesy of Princeton University Press. It seems that they are the opening editions of something called the James Madison Library in American Politics, which is "devoted to reviving important American political writings of the recent and distant past." Sean Wilentz, Princeton history professor and stalwart defender of the Democratic faith, is general editor. And the two books in question are The Ne
Source: NYT
May 6, 2007
THE question trails Robert Caro like a fly, buzzing in his ear. Over and over, at cocktail parties and museum receptions in the past few years, he hears variations on the same query.
“Doesn’t New York need a new master builder?” people ask. “Don’t we need a new Robert Moses?”
Mr. Caro, 71, sits in his spare writer’s aerie high in a Midtown office building, an owlish man with a faint smile. His answer has the virtue of concision:
No.
Mr. Caro, a
Source: http://www.pakistanlink.com
May 5, 2007
An Indian historian has defended Pakistan’s claim on Kashmir, saying it is a “genuine international dispute”. Ramachandra Guha, author of ‘India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy’, has also tried to differentiate between other troublesome Indian locations and the Jammu and Kashmir issue.
Guha says that while the Indian Constitution is competent enough to find solutions for the problems in the Northeast and naxalism, it cannot cope with the Kashmir issue. He
Source: NYT
May 5, 2007
Public broadcasting executives are defending the right of the filmmaker Ken Burns to tell the history of World War II as he sees fit, in the face of escalating complaints and veiled threats of a boycott from Latinos who say his coming PBS documentary “The War” slights Hispanics’ contributions to the war effort.
At what participants described as an emotional meeting on Thursday in Washington, members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus asked corporate sponsors of the 14 and one half
Source: Chicago Maroon (Student newspaper, U. of Chicago)
May 4, 2007
The business of home care in America is too often misunderstood, t the detriment of home-care workers, according to Eileen Boris, University of California–Santa Barbara (UCSB) labor historian. In he talk, entitled “Organizing Home Care: Low-Waged Workers in th Nation’s Health & Welfare,” given at the School of Social Servic Administration (SSA) on Wednesday, Boris discussed the current stat of home care and argued that home-care workers deserve a faire deal in the labor market
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 4, 2007
A recent role model for women's-studies students, according to [Nikki Ayanna Stewart, a Ph.D. candidate in women's studies at the University of Maryland at College Park], is Drew Gilpin Faust, the first female president of Harvard University. Ms. Faust is also a former director of the women's-studies program at the University of Pennsylvania.
In a separate article, though, Caryn McTighe Musil, senior vice president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, says that
Source: Candace de Russy at frontpagemag.com
May 4, 2007
Nadia Abu El-Haj is an assistant professor at Barnard College who deserves more scrutiny from everyone interested in the degenerate methods by which great universities are destroyed.
The greatness of modern, western-style universities – the thing that separates them from all the academies that went before them – is that facts and theories asserted in universities must be supported by verifiable evidence. At the old academies, an appeal to Aristotle, Confucius, or the Bible was enou
Source: Gary Bass in the New Republic
May 3, 2007
.... No doubt the definition of rights, and certainly the language of it, is slippery and easily exploited. The precise content of a right is always up for debate, as are the people who get to hold them. (Under the English Bill of Rights, Protestants were allowed to carry arms sufficient to defend themselves.) Rights are supposed to exist in all times and all places: the enslavement of the Spartan helots and apartheid are what we would call human rights violations. But, as Lynn Hunt's splendid n
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN Blog, Cliopatria
May 3, 2007
When Tony Blair steps down as the British PM"within the next few weeks," he is likely to be succeeded by a historian. At 16, James Gordon Brown (1951- ), the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, entered the University of Edinburgh to study history. He graduated with First Class Honors. Brown remained at Edinburgh for his doctorate, writing a disserta
Source: Canada.com
May 3, 2007
War historian Jack Granatstein has joined the verbal battle over whether an exhibit at the Canadian War Museum should be changed in the face of veterans' angry complaints it portrays Second World War bomber crews as "war criminals."
In a blunt statement Wednesday to a Senate subcommittee examining the issue, Granatstein said it would be wrong to bow to demands to alter the exhibit.
Granatstein, an author and a former head of the museum, said he has d
Source: Investor's Business Daily
May 3, 2007
A key member of Petraeus' "Baghdad brain trust" is Col. H.R. McMaster, author of the book "Dereliction of Duty" that analyzes the mistakes of the Vietnam War. McMaster's skills in executing a "clear, hold, and build" counterinsurgency strategy succeeded spectacularly in bringing the city of Tal Afar in western Nineva Province under coalition control in the fall of 2005. Voter turnout in the Tal Afar region soon increased by about 550%.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 3, 2007
America's push for racial integration began stalling in the 1970s and now seems mired in indifference, says UC Berkeley history Professor Leon Litwack.
Litwack, 77, a leading historian of race in America, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and much-admired teacher, ends his 43-year Cal career on Monday in front of 700 undergraduates in his History 7B class at Wheeler Hall. His final lecture on America's racial divide is titled "Fight the Power."
In an interview wit
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 3, 2007
... The Dimensions of Culture sequence [freshman comp, in effect] is required for all freshmen at UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College, which as one of the university’s six undergraduate colleges has a unique mission. Conceived by faculty and students and founded in 1970, the college has been distinguished by a particular commitment to issues of diversity and social justice. The Dimensions of Culture program specifically is supposed to consider the question of “how scholars move from knowledge to ac
Source: HNN Staff; bios provided by NYT
May 3, 2007
In a section of its website behind a subscription wall the NYT is now featuring a historians' blog.
It's called: Campaigning for History: Reflections on the American Presidency in a Political Season.
Bloggers include:
David Greenberg, an assistant professor of history and journalism at Rutgers University, in New Brunswick, N.J., is the author of three books, “Nixon’s Shadow,” “Presidential Doodles” and, most recently, “Calvin Coolidge.” He writes the “H
Source: NYT
May 3, 2007
Robert M. Warner, who built a legislative consensus to wrest the National Archives from political control when he was its director, died on April 24 in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 79. The cause was a heart attack after a yearlong battle with cancer, his son, Mark Warner, said.
From 1980 to 1985, Dr. Warner, as the sixth Archivist of the United States, ran the archives, the depository for the nation’s historical documents, from the Declaration of Independence to the Nixon tapes.
