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.concernedjournalists.org
Apr 24, 2007
Like a Tahitian pearl diver, the world of entry level newspaper jobs was his oyster when David Halberstam graduated from Harvard in 1955 after spending his senior year as managing editor of The Harvard Crimson.
But unlike many of his peers who quickly grabbed offers in New York and Washington, David went South, Deep South, to the smallest paper in Mississippi. It was the kind of decision that always set him apart from other journalists.
We all eventually came to recogni
Source: Jon Meacham in Newsweek
Apr 24, 2007
It was the spring of 1955, a year after Brown vs. Board of Education, and David Halberstam wanted to be where the action was. Fresh from Harvard College, he set out for the Deep South, for a reporter’s job on the paper in tiny West Point, Miss. The South did not get any deeper, nor newspapers any tinier, than in West Point. But the story did not get any bigger, either. Halberstam, who had grown up in New York, understood that a war was under way in the streets of the South and in the hearts
Source: Slate
Apr 24, 2007
"I've just won the Pulitzer and you're sending me to Buffalo?" David Halberstam said in 1964 to Arthur Gelb, his editor at the New York Times.
Halberstam also crumpled and handed back to Gelb the assignment sheet containing the details for the overnight trip he had written. Only 30 years old, Halberstam found the idea of covering a state Democratic Party "showdown" as beneath him, Gelb writes in his memoir, City Room.
The arrogant reporter made the t
Source: CommonDreams.org
Apr 24, 2007
[CommonDreams.org] Editor’s Note: This piece was submitted, coincidentally on the day of Mr. Halberstam’s untimely and unfortunate death, by Common Dreams reader Dick Atlee with the following note:
“I thought this might be of interest to you. It appeared in Parade Magazine almost exactly 25 years ago, written by David Halberstam 20 years after he arrived in Vietnam on the way to becoming one of the premier journalists of the time. It was written as a letter to his (at the time) 2-ye
Source: NYT
Apr 24, 2007
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was remembered yesterday as a pre-eminent historian, a lifelong liberal and a father who danced with his daughter and watched Sergeant Bilko with a son.
At a memorial service in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, in Lower Manhattan, historians, diplomats and a former president mingled with surviving New Frontiersmen of the Kennedy White House to recall the lasting contributions of Mr. Schlesinger, who died on Feb. 28 at the age of 89. The event filled the 900-
Source: AP
Apr 24, 2007
In the pre-dawn hours of Nov. 23, 1963, Associated Press photographer Horst Faas gathered his gear, left his house in Saigon and climbed aboard a U.S. Army helicopter, one of a fleet carrying hundreds of South Vietnamese troops on a combat operation in the Mekong Delta.
He didn’t bother to wake David Halberstam, the tall, rangy New York Times reporter with whom Faas shared the villa, and who was the acknowledged leader of the small foreign press corps covering the early stages of th
Source: NYT
Apr 24, 2007
The current war in Iraq is mentioned only once in Robert Dallek’s engrossing new book, “Nixon and Kissinger,” and yet the reader cannot help regarding his account of the Nixon White House and its handling of the Vietnam War as a kind of parable about the presidency of George W. Bush and its determination to stay the course in Iraq.
Indeed, Mr. Dallek seems to have taken up the much-written-about subject of Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser (and later secretary of st
Source: NYT
Apr 24, 2007
David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and tireless author of books on topics as varied as America’s military failings in Vietnam, the deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Center and the high-pressure world of professional basketball, was killed yesterday in a car crash south of San Francisco. He was 73, and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Halberstam was a passenger in a car making a turn in Menlo Park, Calif., when it was hit broadside by another car and knocked into a
Source: Radio Free Europe
Apr 23, 2007
Academics in Turkey, where it is illegal to "offend Turkishness," widely object to the characterization of the mass killings of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey from 1915-18 as "genocide." While it is accepted that killings took place during the relocation of Armenians within the Ottoman Empire during World War I, many Turkish scholars do not believe they were the result of a deliberate campaign. RFE/RL spoke with some prominent Turkish historians and lawmakers to hear their take.
Source: http://media.www.nyunews.com
Apr 23, 2007
The first American anti-imperialists came far before the Bush administration entered Iraq.
Cultural historian Jackson Lears explained the importance of America's anti-imperialist tradition Thursday night at the Silver Center in a lecture titled "The Anti-Imperial Tradition," sponsored by Steinhardt's Department of Culture and Communication Studies.
Lears is this year's visiting scholar for the Phyllis and Gerald LeBoff Distinguished Visiting Scholar Program, w
Source: http://timesunion.com
Apr 23, 2007
Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, presidential historian and rabid Red Sox fan Doris Kearns Goodwin was understandably distracted.
The doorbell had somehow stuck at her Concord, Mass., home, and she was shouting questions to her husband, Richard Goodwin, about the problem and preparing to leave for Fenway Park for a pre-game party before Friday night's start of a home stand against the archrival New York Yankees.
In advance of Tuesday's visit to Albany for a talk about Abrah
Source: NYT/AP
Apr 23, 2007
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist David Halberstam was killed in a car crash Monday, a county coroner said. He was 73.
Halberstam, a New Yorker who chronicled the Washington press corps, the Vietnam War generation and baseball, was a passenger in a car broadsided by another vehicle near the Dumbarton Bridge in Menlo Park, south of San Francisco, according to San Mateo County Coroner Robert Foucrault.
The accident occurred around 10:30 a.m. and the driver of t
Source: Steven Plaut at FrontpageMag.com (Note: The original article includes links to the sources cited in the text.)
Apr 23, 2007
[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.]
Academic hiring and promotion processes are mysterious procedures poorly understood by the public. While supposedly designed to ensure quality contro
Source: http://www.pr-inside.com
Apr 22, 2007
Eminent Food Historian Caroline Yeldham today encourages the revival of extinct English recipes using English fresh produce and calls on people to learn how to cook them. The comments come as England celebrates St. George's Day, which was declared an English feast day in the 15th Century.
Medieval cookery was the basis of modern European cuisine. However, only a dozen known original medieval recipe texts remain, of which fewer than five are in hard copy print. Only two of the UK's 193 hig
Source: AP
Apr 22, 2007
... Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, whose January report on changing the U.S. military strategy in Iraq was largely adopted as part of Bush's new approach to the war, said in an interview Thursday that it appears the administration believes it will have to sustain the troop buildup much longer.
"They seem to be taking the steps that would make it possible to sustain it for longer, which is good," Kagan said. "But they seem to be reluctant to comm
Source: http://www.rxpgnews.com
Apr 21, 2007
The Archaeological Survey of India - has created a park between the main Taj Mahal structure and the Yamuna river to beautify the complex but a prominent Mughal historian says it can endanger the 17th century monument.
D.D. Dayalan, the ASI chief in Agra, says: 'We have beautified the riverfront which was earlier an eyesore, with litter thrown all around. Visitors were always throwing all kinds of things from the main platform of the Taj.'
But noted historian Prof R. N
Source: Chicago Maroon (Student newspaper, U. of Chicago)
Apr 20, 2007
Dr. Benny Morris, an Israeli historian and professor at Ben Gurio University of the Negev, gave a talk entitled “Nuclear Iran: Second Holocaust?” in the Social Sciences building on Wednesday Morris’s discussion centered on Iran’s purported aim to use nuclea weapons to destroy the state of Israel. Around 100 students attende the event, sponsored by the Chicago Friends of Israel
Morris contended that the situation was a clash of civilizations and that Israel and the West are f
Source: http://www.berkeleydaily.org
Apr 20, 2007
Images of a young Jimmy Hendrix setting his guitar ablaze flickered across the screen at the UC Berkeley Wheeler Auditorium on Wednesday. The film Berkeley in the ’60s was not just entertainment for the some hundred students from History 7B (American History since 1865)—it was classwork.
“When I sat on the advisory committee for this movie in 1990, it was History 7B who viewed it for the first time,” said Leon Litwack, the professor who, after teaching the class for decades is teaching it
Source: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/
Apr 20, 2007
The authors of two acclaimed books, a biography chronicling the life of William James and an ecological history of the American South, have won the Bancroft Prize for 2007: Robert D. Richardson for William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Houghton Mifflin) and Jack Temple Kirby for Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (University of North Carolina).
One of the most coveted honors in the field of history, the Bancroft is awarded annually by the Trustees
Source: Fox News
Apr 19, 2007
Dr. Michael Foret of the UW-Stevens Point History Department has been suspended with pay after being arrested for possessing child pornography.
Chancellor Linda Bunnell said in a statement that the arrest happened Tuesday evening at his home.
Foret is banned from campus.
Bunnell says state, county and UWSP law enforcement officials worked together in the investigation leading to the arrest.
He made an initial court appearance in Portage County
