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: AHA Perspectives
Mar 8, 2007
It could perhaps happen only in Atlanta. The historians who usually gather sedately and seriously for the AHA annual meeting could be seen this time stomping their feet and swaying to the sweet sounds of the South—and joining in the singing too—during a plenary session that was given over to history presented as performance. The 121st annual meeting was remarkable also for several other firsts: the first film festival; the first time the presidential address was translated into sign language; an
Source: NYT
Mar 8, 2007
... Today the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is scheduled to discuss a new bill that would overturn Mr. Bush’s order [limiting access to presidential records], said a committee spokeswoman, Karen Lightfoot. The sponsors, who include the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, hope to bring the bill to the floor of the House next week.
The 1978 Presidential Records Act, part of the post-Watergate reforms, clearly gave the American public owner
Source: NYT
Mar 8, 2007
Winthrop D. Jordan, a National Book Award-winning historian who wrote several influential works on American slavery and race relations, died on Feb. 23 at his home in Oxford, Miss. He was 75.
The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, said his wife, Cora.
At his death, Dr. Jordan was emeritus professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Mississippi, where he taught from 1982 until his retirement in 2004.
Source: Times (UK)
Mar 8, 2007
Nobody who met David Rattray, the internationally renowned historian of the Anglo-Zulu war, ever forgot him and nobody who heard his stories ever forgot them either. For the hundreds of Times readers who will have heard him speak, as he so often did, at the Royal Geographical Society in London, or who will have sat at the base of that brooding sphinx-shaped mountain that stands guard at Isandlwana as he unfolded the tale of that long-ago battle, the news of his murder at his farmhouse at Fugitiv
Source: NYT
Mar 8, 2007
In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, “buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean.”
The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.
Now lawmakers and scholars are hoping to pry open the gatew
Source: Time Magazine
Mar 7, 2007
Princeton University's Elaine Pagels is about the nearest thing there is to a superstar in the realm of Christian history scholarship. It is largely through her work that many understand the early non-Orthodox Christianity that she at one point dubbed (and later un-dubbed, finding the term imprecise) the Gnostic Gospels. She breaks new ground with the debut of Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, her collaboration with Harvard Divinity scholar Karen King about the
Source: http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/
Mar 7, 2007
In 1912, something very bad happened in Forsyth County. But if you live in Atlanta -- and rely on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for information – you may have found out about it just seven weeks ago.
What occurred during the intervening 95 years has a lot to do with the South's collective amnesia over its racial sins. And, according to a new book by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the AJC has contributed over the years to the memory loss.
The book – Buried in th
Source: WSJ
Mar 7, 2007
"No intellectual phenomenon has been more surprising in recent years than the revival in the United States of conservatism as a respectable social philosophy."
Thus wrote that lion of American liberalism, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., in 1955, long before the Reagan and Gingrich revolutions. Here was a historian whose understanding of the past afforded him remarkable perspective on the future.
Schlesinger's death last week at 89 raises the question of whether the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 7, 2007
[Norman Birnbaum is a professor emeritus at Georgetown University Law Center and a member of the editorial board of The Nation. His books include After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2001), and he is at work on a memoir.]
first met Arthur when I came to Harvard as a graduate student in sociology, in 1947, and I had the good fortune to see a lot of him. From 1949 to 1952, I was a resident tutor at Adams Hous
Source: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen
Mar 6, 2007
Michael Katz has established himself as one of the United States' pre-eminent historians of social change, delving into education, urbanization, family life, and poverty in a distinguished career at the University of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Katz, who previously taught at York University and the University of Toronto, co-wrote the 2006 book One Nation Indivisible: What America Was and What It Is Becoming. In the book, he and Mark Stern discuss his country's demographic, social and geograph
Source: Jewish Journal
Mar 6, 2007
The view from Daniel Pipes' front porch in Malibu is "California Dreamin'" perfect. With the Pacific stretching beyond the horizon, the vista induces a Zen-like calm. If the scholar's striped cotton shirt and khakis betray his Boston roots, Pipes' barely audible voice and gentle demeanor suggest that he has gone native just weeks after his arrival as a visiting professor this semester at Pepperdine University.
But Pipes' words are not so laid-back. The 57-year-old Harvard-
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 6, 2007
A historian of the European Middle Ages is among the six winners of the 2007 Dan David Prize, to be presented in Paris on Thursday. The prize honors scientific, technological, and humanistic achievements, and is awarded in three categories for achievements related to the past, present, and future.
Jacques Le Goff will receive the $1-million prize for achievements that benefit understanding of the past, in recognition of contributions to his discipline over the past half century. Mr.
Source: http://www.journalstar.com
Mar 6, 2007
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has sued the Department of Homeland Security in a ramped-up effort to bring a long-awaited hire to the United States.
UNL filed a lawsuit Friday in U.S. District Court asking a judge demand federal officials to consider the visa petition of Waskar Ari, a Bolivian professor hired by UNL in 2005 to teach courses on Latin American history.
Ari has been stuck at home in La Paz for nearly two years as officials stall approval of his work vi
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandstorm
Mar 5, 2007
[Martin Kramer is the Wexler-Fromer fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem and the Olin Institute at Harvard. He is the author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.]
The British historian Robert Irwin is the sort of scholar who, in times past, would have been proud to call himself an Orientalist.
The traditional Orientalist was someone who mastered difficult languag
Source: Tartan (Carnegie-Mellon University), "Pillbox"
Mar 5, 2007
“When students tell me that women’s history is no longer a valid field, I don’t know whether to weep, cut my throat, or shake them until they wake up,” said Gerda Lerner, who is credited as one of the first pioneers of women’s history. Lerner gave a lecture last Wednesday as the inaugural speaker for the Margaret Morrison Distinguished Lecture in Women’s History Series.
Lerner has not only devoted her life to raising awareness of women’s history in America; she’s lived through harro
Source: BBC
Mar 5, 2007
The death has been announced in Paris of one of the greatest figures in modern French literature, the writer Henri Troyat, at the age of 95.
He was the author of more than 100 works of fiction, history and biography - the most recent published a year ago.
Mr Troyat was born into an Armenian family in Moscow, but his businessman father fled the Russian revolution, and the family eventually settled in Paris.
He wrote in French but many of his works dealt
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 5, 2007
Back in July, Stacy Schiff of The New Yorker profiled a Wikipedia administrator called Essjay as part of a sprawling piece on the open-source encyclopedia. To many scholars who read the piece, Essjay was a fascinating figure -- a "tenured professor of religion at a private university" who not only edited articles on penitential rites and transubstantiation but also corrected errors in Wikipedia's write-up of Justin Timberlake.
But as it turns out, Essjay's story was a bit
Source: Independent (UK)
Mar 5, 2007
For decades, the female sitter in this 16th-century miniature painting remained unidentified. But after investigating the woman's jewellery, the historian David Starkey is now convinced this is the only known portrait of Lady Jane Grey painted during her lifetime to have survived.
It may have been produced when Lady Jane, the queen who ruled for nine days, was living in royal lodgings at the Tower of London where, instead of being crowned, she was executed in February 1554.
Source: Daniel Pipes at FrontpageMag.com
Mar 5, 2007
Tariq Ramadan accuses me of lying, a charge I take seriously. But, as so often is the case with Islamists and other totalitarians, the accuser himself stands accused.Ramadan sat in the audience during my debate with Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, on January 20, 2007, and heard me call on Westerners to help build a moderate Islam. Addressing the mayor, I suggested (as can be read in the transcript,"
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 5, 2007
In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, historian Maurice Isserman identifies Brown University's Paul Buhle, as one of the three key leaders of the new SDS.
Although Buhle holds no official position in the new SDS, he is among the principal elders involved in the effort to revive it and is an editor at Next Left Notes. Now in his early sixties and a senior lecturer in history and American c
