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: WaPo
Mar 15, 2007
Benis M. Frank, 82, a Marine Corps chief historian who started the military branch's oral history program, died March 10 at Prince George's Hospital Center. He had congestive heart failure.
Mr. Frank, a Bowie resident, was a Marine Corps veteran of World War II and the Korean War and rose to the rank of captain in the Marine Corps Reserve.
After a career in sales and teaching, he joined the Marine Corps as a civilian in 1961. He worked in the History and Museums Divisio
Source: Adam Hochschild in Mother Jones
Mar 14, 2007
Accompanying Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates Jr. across the Harvard
University campus is like following a beloved small-town mayor."Hi
Skip!""How're you doing, Skip?""How's that leg of yours, Skip?"—for
he is on crutches today. And he has a kind word for everybody. A young
woman approaches and greets him warmly; he gives her a friendly kiss
on the cheek; they laugh and chat; we walk on, and he jokes,"Sexual
harassment!" Then, barely missing a beat, exuberantly, with her still
in earshot,"She's
Source: Budapestsun.com
Mar 14, 2007
David Irving, the convicted British holocaust denier, arrived in Budapest on Monday, March 12, at the invitation of publishers, Sándor and Tibor Gede, to launch the Hungarian-language version of his book Nurnberg - The Last Battle.
Due to remain in Hungary for one week for book signing events, Irving is expected to speak at the extreme-right Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIÉP) party rally on March 15. Following an appeal, Irving was released on probation from an Austrian prison
Source: BBC
Mar 14, 2007
Today, with the spring sun trying to burn through an early morning Belgian mist, it is hard to imagine that this innocuous looking potato field was once the hellish moonscape of the front line.
By the end of World War I life on the surface had become untenable. Tons of steel fell from the sky in a near continuous bombardment.
The Germans retreated into thick concrete pillboxes. The British dug further and further underground.
Today we often pict
Source: HNN Staff
Mar 14, 2007
Kimberly Kagan, Yale Ph.D., has been appointed by the Weekly Standard to provide readers with a fortnightly progress report on"the surge."
Her credentials are stellar. This is how she is described on the website of the Center for Peace and Security Studies, where she is an adjunct:
Kimberly Kagan is an Adjunct Pro
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 13, 2007
After gently digging through a few boxes, and finding only letters and old memoranda, Kevin Anderson settles on Box No. 83 and opens the lid. In a file called "Afghanistan Guerrillas," on the back of a sheet of paper that says "Season's Greetings 1984," he finds what he has been looking for: a sample of his father's enigmatic, idiosyncratic shorthand.
The writing is that of Jack Anderson, author, with Drew Pearson, of the famous Washington Merry-Go-Round column t
Source: The Hindu (Chennai, India)
Mar 13, 2007
FEROKE, Kerala, India -- The curtain came down on the three-day, 67th session of the Indian History Congress with a call to the Centre to free the Archaeological Survey of India and the National Archives of India from bureaucratic control.
A resolution adopted at the closing plenary here on Monday regretted the continuing tendency to place the administration of such organisations in the hands of government officials and keep professionals out of their helm.
Despite str
Source: Martin Sieff at the website of the American Conservative
Mar 12, 2007
[Martin Sieff is national security correspondent for United Press International. He has reported from more than 60 countries, covered seven guerrilla wars and ethnic conflicts and been nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.]
Historical surveys of war and the way technological developments change the way it is fought are common—from the tours de force of major military historians like Martin Van Creveld and William O’Neill to potboilers marketed to
Source: Irwin Stelzer in the Weekly Standard
Mar 12, 2007
Anyone who thinks President George W. Bush is spending sleepless nights worrying about the machinations of the Democratic Congress, or figuring out how a lame duck president can limp from the political battlefield with honor intact, had better think again. And anyone who likes to regale his friends with references to that illiterate cowboy in the White House is due for some considerable embarrassment when the nonpartisan studies of the Bush years begin to hit the bookshops.
Those ar
Source: Publisher's Weekly
Mar 12, 2007
Nixon and Kissinger:
Partners in Power
Robert Dallek. HarperCollins, $29.95 (752p) ISBN 978-0-06-072230-2
Bestselling author Dallek (An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy) delivers what will quickly become recognized as a classic of modern history: the definitive analysis of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's complex, often troubled partnership in running American foreign policy from January 1969 through August 1974. Dallek has had unprecedented access to major new resource
Source: New Republic
Mar 12, 2007
Last year, New York University announced the creation of a new institute, The Center for the United States and the Cold War. There is nothing surprising about a major university establishing a center meant to explore and shed light on one of the defining periods of the past century. Indeed, a few such institutes already exist. Since 1991, the Wilson Center has run a first rate operation, The Cold War International History Project, which has hosted scores of conferences, with panels composed of m
Source: cbs11tv.com (Dallas)
Mar 12, 2007
They had a date with destiny in Dealey Plaza. Three shots changed the course of history.
More than 43 years after the Kennedy assassination, some folks still wonder whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.
Two people who have studied the facts believe a critical piece of evidence remains hidden at the scene.
The Zapruder Film documents two shots fired hit the president in Dealey Plaza. But eye witnesses heard three shots. Many have presumed it was the third
Source: NYT
Mar 12, 2007
When Conrad M. Black pleaded not guilty to criminal fraud charges in December 2005, a federal court in Chicago granted his request that he be defended by Edward L. Greenspan, one of the most famous criminal defense lawyers in Canada, where he is known by the nickname Fast Eddie.
But the court made Mr. Black sign a waiver acknowledging that he understood that his lawyer, for all his renown in Canada, does not know American law.
If he loses, Mr. Black, who faces more tha
Source: Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 12, 2007
David W. Saxe was mixing potato salad for a Fourth of July picnic last summer when he was interrupted by a telephone call from a Pennsylvania legislator. Lawmakers, Mr. Saxe learned, had just approved $500,000 to help him start a new center on civic education and America's founding.
Mr. Saxe, an associate professor of education at Pennsylvania State University's main campus, was shocked — not just to learn of his good fortune on such a historically important day but because he never
Source: Fredric Smoler in American Heritage
Mar 12, 2007
The new counsel to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talks about the uses of history, in Iraq and everywhere else wars are fought.
Up to a point, Eliot A. Cohen’s curriculum vitae looks like that of many high-flying American academics: a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at Harvard, academic posts at Harvard and Johns Hopkins, eight books, and so on. But he also was just named counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
He has been the director for Pacific and Atlantic issu
Source: Historian Michael Brooks at his blog
Mar 12, 2007
I interviewed Dr. Jacques Pluss last year after he was attacked by neo-Nazi groups. Pluss was once a member of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), and he left the group in a rather public fashion, claiming that he really joined in order to do research on the phenomenon of American neo-Nazism.
I thought at the time that Pluss was just another victim of the propaganda efforts of members and former members of the NSM, and believed him when he denied adhering to National Socialist ph
Source: Newsweek
Mar 12, 2007
Steve Prothero is the kind of professor who makes you want to go back to college. During an hour lecture of his Boston University course "Death and Immortality," 200 students sat rapt last week as his train of thought led him from the Docetics (early Christians who believed that Jesus was all-God, not flesh), to reincarnation, to Disney World, to Hindu cremation rituals, to Plato's account of Socrates' trial (the day's assigned reading), to "Beauty and the Beast," to a hypoth
Source: Newsweek
Mar 12, 2007
On a Saturday evening in Georgetown in late 1946, the columnist Joe Alsop was giving a dinner at his house in the 2700 block of Dumbarton. The guests were predictably drawn from the glamorous and the powerful; Supreme Court justices, ambassadors and influential journalists frequently came to Alsop's table. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., not yet 30 and already a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, was there, as were the Henry Cabot Lodges. Mrs. Lodge, Schlesinger noted in a letter to his parents, was &quo
Source: University of Connecticut Advance
Mar 12, 2007
Mark Overmyer-Velázquez believes current and past debates about the “problem of immigration” have never resolved the fundamental issue underlying south-north Mexican migration: the enormous economic disparities between the two countries.
“Since the beginning of the 20th century and especially in the years during and immediately following the Mexican Revolution, U.S. immigration policy has been characterized by deep ambivalence and fragmentation,” says Overmyer-Velázquez, an assistan
Source: Speech at Tokyo University
Mar 11, 2007
I was born in Israel and I had a very conventional, typical Israeli education, and life, until I finished my B.A. studies at Hebrew University, which was many years ago in the mid-1970s. Like all Israeli Jews, I knew very little on the Palestinian side, and met very few Palestinians. And although I was a very keen student of history, already in high-school ? I knew I would be a historian ? I was very loyal to the narrative that I was taught in school. I had very little doubt that what my teacher
