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.nola.com
Apr 30, 2007
It's amazing to me that it is taking ThyssenKrupp so long to decide where it will locate its new steel plant. There's only one logical place in the American South for such a plant: Louisiana's "German Coast."
A pair of UNO history professors recently made the connection between our German history and our potential German future and noted that the St. James Parish site the company is considering adjoins the German Coast area.
"Have Governor Blanco and her
Source: Anthony Grafton in the Daily Princetonian
Apr 30, 2007
I'm at Cambridge, the one across the pond, spying on a different kind of academic life. It's not the first time I've had the chance to do this. Back in 1983-84, my family and I spent a year in Oxford, where I was a visiting fellow at Pembroke College.
Before this fall, though, I enjoyed many pleasant lunches in the Senior Common Room but otherwise kept my head down. I spent long weekdays working in the magnificent Bodleian Library and long weekends having fun with my family, he
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Apr 29, 2007
"We're trying to do something against mealy-mouthed policies that don't hold responsible those scum with Ph.D.'s who stand beside torturers," Gerald Sider, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, snarled to a reporter for Inside Higher Ed.
Sider was interviewed in November at the 105th annual business meeting of the American Anthropological Association in San Jose. The meeting was abuzz over a year-old New Yorker article by
Source: James Traub in the course of a review of a short biography of Kennan by John Lukacs
Apr 29, 2007
... George Kennan was not a happy fellow. His mother died when he was an infant, and the stepmother who raised him was “nervous and cold.” His own disposition, from the outset, was solitary and melancholy. The great Protestant virtues — duty, discipline, self-denial — ran deep in him. And his penetrating and lucid intellect operated as a kind of acid bath for received wisdom. He saw Russia, his great subject, free from the dogmas of left and right. As early as 1938, he urged Americans to abandon
Source: Dennis Lythgoe in the Deseret News (Utah)
Apr 29, 2007
Davis Bitton passed away recently after a distinguished, even elegant, career as a historian/professor. He was 77. He grew up in Blackfoot, Idaho, but his super brain decreed that he should be educated at Princeton — where he came away with both a master's and a doctorate.
But for an erudite man, he was very gentle.
Shortly after he joined the University of Utah history faculty, I was assigned to be his graduate research assistant. I think I was the first on
Source: Times (of London)
Apr 29, 2007
It was a brutal murder, even by the standards of South Africa. The world-famous historian and storyteller David Rattray, a friend of Prince Charles, is shot at close range in his home. The police, the family and the government insist the motive is robbery — but there is new evidence that much darker forces are at work....
Most white farmers in the region fear that land is the real reason that he was killed. The ANC government, sensing its popularity declining among the poorest black
Source: Daily Star (Beirut)
Apr 28, 2007
[Mr. Young is the opinion editor of the paper.]
... Halberstam's work on Vietnam [in a sense] was just an earlier rendition of American writing on Iraq today: a foreign adventure that allows Americans to write mostly about other Americans. Along with "The Best and the Brightest," Neil Sheehan's "A Bright Shining Lie," Michel Herr's "Dispatches," and Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" are all outstanding books about America in Vietnam - and there
Source: http://www.flyernews.com/
Apr 27, 2007
UD professor Dr. Janet Bednarek, an aviation historian, will be a part of the first episode in the second season of “Our Generation,” a show on The History Channel. The episode is set to air June 15.
This segment of the series is investigating the history of aviation, with a focus on the baby boomer generation of the ’60s as a turning point in the history of flight.In the past few years, Bednarek has been receiving recognition for her research and wo
Source: http://www.semissourian.com
Apr 27, 2007
America's culture of the Old West was wrapped up in violence, a Yale University professor said Thursday night at Southeast Missouri State University.
Dr. John Mack Faragher, a prominent historian and scholar of the American West, delivered the sixth annual Veryl Riddle Distinguished History Lecture to a crowd of about 70 people at the Show Me Center. The lecture series is named after its benefactor, a prominent Southeast Missouri lawyer.
The 19th-century American fronti
Source: NYT
Apr 27, 2007
Emily W. Sunstein, an independent scholar known for writing biographies of an unconventional mother and her unconventional daughter — Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley — died on Saturday in Philadelphia. She was 82 and had lived in Philadelphia for many years.
The cause was complications of autoimmune vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels, her daughter Kay Hymowitz said.
Ms. Sunstein’s first biography, “A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft,” w
Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz
Apr 27, 2007
The $1.6 million spent on the Government's TREATY 2U Treaty of Waitangi roadshow have been largely wasted, Auckland University of Technology (AUT) history professor Paul Moon said yesterday.
Professor Moon said he was concerned that public money was still being poured into the programme even though the public's reaction has been one of almost complete disinterest.
"There is no business case to support this roadshow continuing," Prof Moon said.
"The numbe
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Apr 27, 2007
On Tuesday, April 24, 2007, Dr. Robert M. Warner, sixth Archivist of the United States, died after a long battle with cancer.
Dr. Warner served as Archivist of the United States from 1980 through 1985, leading the agency during one of the most important periods in its history: the transformation from a division of the General Services Administration (GSA) to an independent executive agency.
His four-year fight for independence was won on October 19, 1984, when President Ronal
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 27, 2007
The unexpected death this week of David Halberstam left a sudden vacancy at the commencement podium of Brandeis University, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer was to have delivered a graduation address on May 20. But Brandeis has quickly come up with a substitute: Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times columnist and the recipient of three Pulitzers, will speak instead, the university announced on Thursday. Mr. Friedman will be a busy man that weekend. On May 19 he will deliver the commencem
Source: http://www.njjewishnews.com
Apr 26, 2007
As residents of a state that is often the butt of comedians' jokes, New Jerseyans need a morale boost now and then.
That is just what they got last Wednesday night at the YM-YWHA of Union County, in a talk that offered a rapid rundown of the accomplishments that set the state apart.
Marc Mappen, executive director of the New Jersey Historical Commission, regaled a gathering of around 50 people at a talk cosponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women's Union County
Source: Nathanael D. Robinson at Cliopartia (HNN Blog)
Apr 26, 2007
Bronislaw Geremek, French historian and Polish politician, may lose his seat in the European Parliament: he refuses to sign a statement, per a new Polish law, declaring that he did not collaborate with secret state police during the communist era. He has resisted because, first, he already signed a st
Source: National Interest
Apr 26, 2007
En route to Moscow to serve as Ambassador Averell Harriman’s minister-counselor in June 1944, George F. Kennan spent two miserable days in Baghdad. Musing on America potentially supplanting Britain as the dominant Western power in the region, he wrote in his diary:
“Are we willing to bear this responsibility? I know—and every realistic American knows—that we are not. Our government is technically incapable of conceiving and promulgating a long-term consistent policy toward areas rem
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Apr 26, 2007
On April 26, 2007, the National Coalition for History, the American Historical Association, and twenty other organizations wrote to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein to express concerns about the possible destruction of records relating to the cases of detainees being held at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. A recent federal court Protective Order concerning the case records could possibly be interpreted to authorize or direct t
Source: http://www.todayszaman.com
Apr 25, 2007
Yusuf Halacoglu of the Turkish Historical Society (TTK) and historian David Gaunt of Sodertorns University College in Sweden in a collaborative effort opened a mass grave on Monday in the southeastern town of Nusaybin, which Armenian historians say may contain the remains of victims of the alleged 1915 genocide of Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman Empire.
Nevertheless the endeavor didn't seem to be satisfactory for Gaunt, who refused to collect earth or bone samples from the gra
Source: Press Release -- Bowling Green
Apr 25, 2007
America has long had a love-hate relationship with the corporation. While a symbol of wealth and capitalism, business has also been viewed as impersonal and greedy, trampling the rights of the common man.
While most historians view corporate power first arising in 19th-century America, a new book by Dr. Andrew Schocket of Bowling Green State University makes the case that the very fabric of American society has been interwoven with corporate involvement from the earliest days of the
Source: Nation
Apr 24, 2007
[James C. Davis, Professor Emeritus of Italian History at the University of Pennsylvania.]
You find it hard to keep them straight? Well, here they are: the candidates.
In ’04 John Edwards ran for Veep. (Instead we got the surly creep.)
We used to say that Gore’s a bore. On warming, though, he knows the score.
The joint will jump if we choose Hill. (First Gent will be the randy Bill.)
Obama warned, “Avoid Iraq!” McCain says, “Beat ‘
