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: Press Release -- Maggio & Kattar, P.C. is a Washington, DC based full-service immigration law firm
May 3, 2007
Washington, DC – Pending for almost two years, an employment visa petition filed by the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (“UNL”) on behalf of Dr. Waskar Ari, a Bolivian historian whom the university seeks to hire as an Assistant Professor of History and Ethnic Studies, was finally approved by the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) after a lawsuit to compel action was filed in federal district court. Dr. Ari now must apply for a visa at the U.S. Consulate in La Paz, Bolivia where visa issua
Source: Manan Ahmed at Cliopatria (HNN blog)
May 2, 2007
It started innocently enough.
I had been mulling that blogging historians should be make a panel submission to AHA - on their actual work - and not just on 'blogging'. A comment thread sparked the idea forward into motion and soon enough, we had a full blown roundtable panel proposal submitted to the AHA. I had some other ideas of sharing some of our research and even allow
Source: Ohio State student newspaper--The Lantern
May 2, 2007
Most Americans are familiar with John Adams and Harry Truman. Both were former U.S. presidents, but they had something else in common: an excellent knowledge of history.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough emphasized the importance of knowing history at a lecture Monday at the Wexner Center.
McCullough said Adams and Truman are examples of men who reflected upon history before making decisions that affected the future.
McCullough's lecture, &q
Source: AFP
May 2, 2007
France's presidential election has been depicted as the moment when the country could finally choose the path of liberal economic reform, bending to the winds of globalisation by choosing the pro-market agenda of Nicolas Sarkozy.
But nothing could be further from the truth, according to British historian Robert Tombs, who says the most that can be expected from a Sarkozy victory over Socialist Segolene Royal on Sunday is "some tweaking round the edges" of the French state
Source: Independent
May 2, 2007
Werner Maser was best known for his 1971 study of Hitler, Adolf Hitler: Legende, Mythos, Wirklichkeit ("Hitler: legend, myth and reality"), which was translated into over 20 languages (and published in English as Hitler, 1973), a great achievement considering the vast literature on the subject. The volume was just part of a long study of the Third Reich which included not only the Nazi leader, but also his party, the Nuremberg trials, German-Soviet relations and much more.
Source: Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed
May 2, 2007
Jacques-Alain Miller has delivered unto us his thoughts on Google. In case the name does not signify, Jacques-Alain Miller is the son-in-law of the late Jacques Lacan and editor of his posthumously published works. He is not a Google enthusiast. The search engines follows “a totalitarian maxim,” he says. It is the new Big Brother. “It puts everything in its place,” Miller declares, “turning you into the sum of your clicks until the end of time.”...
For an informed contrast to Jacque
Source: New Perspectives Quarterly
May 1, 2007
Francis Fukuyama is author of the seminal post-Cold War book, The End of History And the Last Man. NPQ editor Nathan Gardels met with Fukuyama at his office at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. in March.
NPQ | The late Isaiah Berlin famously made the distinction between "negative" and "positive" freedom—the first being "freedom from" tyranny and interference and the second being "freedom to" do what one will in his or her zone of no
Source: Excerpt from Ilan Pappe, "The Best Runner in the Class." Published first by Left Curve; republished by electronicintifada.net
May 1, 2007
... Musalem Awad was the only practicing Palestinian historian in Israel who had a permanent post in a university. He was also Yaacov's supervisor, and had been interested for years in the 1948 catastrophe, particularly in the war crimes committed in the coastal area. Yet he never dared to write about it himself and felt uneasy when he assigned it to Yaacov.
Musalem was a conservative historian, believing in hard facts as the core material for telling the story of the past. Such ev
Source: OAH Newsletter
May 1, 2007
On March 7-10, 2007 more than twenty scholars from history and related disciplines gathered in Mobile, Alabama, to participate in a conference on the historical meaning of Hurricane Katrina. Sponsored by the Journal of American History in conjunction with the Department of History at the University of South Alabama, the three-day program entitled, “Through the Eye of Katrina: The Past as Prologue?” was part of the ongoing Howard Mahan lecture and symposium series supported by the University of S
Source: Paul Morton at bookslut.com
May 1, 2007
By the summer of 1862, George McClellan had come within six miles of Richmond and Union forces had obtained 50,000 square miles of key territory in the West. The Confederacy, a fledgling country then only a little over a year old, was an inch away from ceasing to exist. If it had surrendered then, the North would have allowed slavery to persist in the South, at least for a time. But the South was cursed by a hero named Robert E. Lee who took command of the Army of Northern Virginia. “[L]ee’s cou
Source: harvardmagazine.com
May 1, 2007
... If Ferguson has had a signature theme, it is this: the importance of an energetic liberal empire and how best to carry it off, as did, for the most part, the British and Romans. Though his next few years will be dedicated to his other principal interests, namely money, German-Jewish history, and power, it is his multiple works on empire that have brought him notoriety.
At the age of 43, the prodigious Ferguson has produced eight meaty, weighty books, and has another two in progr
Source: Partial list of articles in the May issue of AHA's Perspectives
May 1, 2007
Doing History in the Digital Age
by Barbara Weinstein
News
AHA Launches Online Directory
of History Journals
History and the Changing Landscape
of Information: An Editor’s Note
Zotero: Social and Semantic Computing for Historical Scholarship
by Daniel J. Cohen
The Digital History Reader:
Teaching Resources for U.S.
and European History
by E. Thomas Ewing
and Robert P. Stephens
Source: AP
May 1, 2007
JOHANNESBURG -- An eminent South African historian believes he has stumbled on the identity of Jack the Ripper.
Charles van Onselen said at first he wasn't sure he wanted to publicize the conclusions he drew when he noticed parallels in the century-old, unsolved Ripper case and the background of Joseph Silver, who terrorized women as "King of the Pimps" in Johannesburg...
The publicity around van Onselen's The Fox and The Flies: The World of Joseph Silver,
Source: NYT
May 1, 2007
The gripping black-and-white photographs of civil rights protesters in the South reflect the black-and-white morality tale that generally accompanies them. Hateful, jeering white mobs and attack dogs versus peaceful marchers asking to vote and to walk in the front door.
That story line is true, but so are others. A new generation of historians is exploring some of the untold stories of the civil rights movement and its legacies: the experiences not of heroes or murderous villains, b
Source: http://www.amacad.org
May 1, 2007
Blackbourn, David Gordon
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Hull, Isabel V.
Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Keller, Evelyn Fox
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
MacCormack, Sabine G.
University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana
Owen, E. Roger
Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Painter, Nell Irvin
Pri
Source: Altercation (blog) (Click on the SOURCE link to see embedded links in this excerpt)
Apr 30, 2007
In his Times Select-only column, here, Frank Rich writes of David Halberstam: "He did so despite public ridicule from the dean of that era's Georgetown punditocracy, the now forgotten columnist (and Vietnam War cheerleader) Joseph Alsop. It was Alsop's spirit, not Halberstam's, that could be seen in C-Span's live broadcast of the correspondents' dinner last Saturday, two days before Halberstam's death in a car crash in California. This fete is a crystallization of the press's failures in th
Source: Michael F. Shaughnessy Interviews Will Fitzhugh at Ed Week
Apr 30, 2007
[Dr. Shaughnessy is currently Professor in Educational Studies and is a Consulting Editor for Gifted Education International and Educational Psychology Review. In addition, he writes for www.EdNews.org <http://www.EdNews.org> and the International Journal of Theory and Research in Education. He has taught students with mental retardation, learning disabilities and gifted. He is on the Governor's Traumatic Brain Inju
Source: Voice of America
Apr 30, 2007
... Frederick Kagan, a military historian and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, says al-Qaida insurgents have increased their attacks in an effort to undermine the Baghdad security plan and erode support for the war in the United States.
"The al-Qaida surge is very serious," said Frederick Kagan. "It is very significant. It is altering the situation in Iraq in unpredictable ways. It is clearly further eroding America's will to stay the course her
Source: Gary Shapiro in the New York Sun
Apr 30, 2007
Mark Moyar doesn't exactly fit the stereotype of a disappointed job seeker. He is an Eagle Scout who earned a summa cum laude degree from Harvard, graduating first in the history department before earning a doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England. Before he had even begun graduate school, he had published his first book and landed a contract for his second book. Distinguished professors at Harvard and Cambridge wrote stellar letters of recommendation for him.
Yet over fi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 30, 2007
After hearing a day and a half of testimony, a federal judge on Thursday abruptly dismissed a lawsuit brought against Temple University by a former student who alleged that his professors retaliated against him for his political views.
The student, Christian M. DeJohn, sued the university and two of his professors in February 2006, contending that the professors had thwarted his efforts to finish a master's degree in history after he complained about receiving "antiwar" e-
