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.sootoday.com
Dec 14, 2006
Michael Aakhus, the University of Southern Indiana's (USI) resident Maya expert, had low expectations for the authenticity of Mel Gibson’s latest film, Apocalypto.
After seeing the film, he said his expectations were met.
"If you like action films, you should enjoy it - but if you are going to learn history, stick to your books," Aakhus said.
Apocalypto, filmed on site in the Yucatec dialect, which Aakhus said is used in the northern section of
Source: Andrew O'Hehir at Salon.com
Dec 14, 2006
Over and over again in Daniel Mendelsohn's book "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million," the author finds himself in the house of some elderly Jewish couple, or widow, of his mother's generation if not older, in various places in the world: Tel Aviv; Stockholm; Copenhagen; Sydney, Australia. There is a ritual aspect to these visits, and not only because Mendelsohn has been invited into these people's houses, cautiously or eagerly as the case may be, in order to remember the dead.
Source: NPR
Dec 14, 2006
It would be a mistake to take U.S. troops away from combat in order to train the Iraqi military, says Frederick Kagan, a former West Point historian.
Kagan argues that before any other measures are considered, American troop strength must be increased, particularly in Baghdad, to establish security for the population.
But, he says, military leaders and mid-level commanders in Iraq have conflicting views on this issue. Michele Norris talks with Kagan, resident scholar
Source: Deborah E. Lipstadt & Rafael Medoff in a letter to the editor of the NYT
Dec 14, 2006
[The writers are, respectively, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University; and director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.]
To the Editor:
Your Dec. 13 report about the Holocaust-denial conference in Iran quoted Germany’s chancellor referring to the attendees as “revisionists,” and France’s foreign minister criticized “the resurgence of revisionist ideas” regarding the Holocaust.
While these leaders are well
Source: AP
Dec 14, 2006
Since becoming the nation's chief archivist, Allen Weinstein has embarked on a campaign to expand what he calls "civic literacy" -- teaching people to better understand and appreciate the origins and meaning of American democracy.
Where better to offer such a class than on the site of the Wall Street building where the U.S. government was founded and George Washington was inaugurated as the first president? And who better to be there than the latest crop of immigrants to
Source: http://jta.org
Dec 13, 2006
An Orthodox historian who published a book on Jewish anti-Zionism said he was prevented from giving a blessing from the bimah in Dublin’s main synagogue.
University of Montreal professor Yakov Rabkin, whose book “A Threat From Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism” charts the history of religious objections to Zionism, tried during Shabbat services Saturday to recite a thanksgiving blessing after crossing the ocean, but was stopped by two members of the congregation.
Source: Oliver Kamm (Blog)
Dec 13, 2006
[Mr. Kamm writes a column for the Times of London.]
I've referred a few times on this site to a lobbying organisation called Media Lens. Media Lens purports to be a watchdog detecting bias in the press and broadcasting media. It is in reality a shrill group of malcontents who exploit the patience of practising journalists. Journalism is a public medium and its practitioners should certainly be prepared to expound their professional methods. The practice of Media Lens, however, is -
Source: Scott McLemee at the website, Insider Higher Ed
Dec 13, 2006
Many recent denunciations of Edward Said’s Orientalism are probably best ignored. After all, a stone-throwing incident hardly provides adequate grounds for criticizing one of the most influential books in the humanities published in recent decades. Said, who at the time of his death in 2003 was a professor of comparative literature at Columbia University, was an extremely tenacious and vocal supporter of the Palestinian nationalist cause. It gave even his scholarly work a degree of fame beyond t
Source: John Derbyshire in the WSJ
Dec 13, 2006
[Mr. Derbyshire's latest book is "Unknown Quantity," a history of algebra.]
While Calvin Coolidge will probably never make the top 10 in those rankings of our presidents that emerge periodically from academic surveys, his reputation has been considerably rehabilitated over the past 40 years from the depths to which the New Deal historians consigned it. His strengths as chief executive are now appreciated, and the immense popularity he enjoyed in his own time is understood
Source: Email to HNN. This response was first posted online elsewhere on Dec. 5. After Campus Watch posted a fresh article on the controversy Professor Babayan asked HNN to give her a chance to respond. We agreed. This was the statement she submitted.
Dec 13, 2006
[Kathryn Babayan is Associate Professor of Iranian History & Culture, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan.]
The following constitutes my response to the recent accounts given by
the UM student organization The American Movement for Israel (AMI),
Guest Speaker Professor Raymond Tanter, and Senior Information Officer
Diane Brown, of the Office of the Associate Vice President for
Facilities and Operations, as th
Source: Emory Wheel
Dec 12, 2006
Emory's top expert on the Arab-Israeli conflict outlined his criticisms of Jimmy Carter's new book on Monday, charging the former president with distorting the history of Arab-Israeli relations.
Professor Kenneth Stein, who resigned last week from his post at The Carter Center over the book, listed two "egregious and inexcusable errors" and several other inaccuracies in Carter's Palestine: Peace, Not Apartheid.
Although Carter has insisted in several intervie
Source: CBS News
Dec 11, 2006
... If the struggle between gun rights and gun control advocates seems as eternal as the battle between lions and hyenas, it is. At least, in America. In a solid new book: “A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America," Ohio State University history professor Saul Cornell argues that “the original understanding of the Second Amendment was neither an individual right of self-defense nor a collective right of the states, but rather a civic right tha
Source: NYT
Dec 10, 2006
MAYFLOWER
A Story of Courage, Community, and War.
Nathaniel Philbrick. Viking, $29.95.
This absorbing history of the Plymouth Colony is a model of revisionism. Philbrick impressively recreates the pilgrims' dismal 1620 voyage, bringing to life passengers and crew, and then relates the events of the settlement and its first contacts with the native inhabitants of Massachusetts. Most striking are the parallels he subtly draws with the present, particularly in his accou
Source: Tristram Hunt in the Guardian reviewing Chris Wrigley's AJP Taylor: Radical Historian of Europe by
Dec 9, 2006
"I wondered whether you ever had an opening for a lively talker on current affairs in television. As you know, I can do very nicely in impromptu discussion; and if you are ever thinking of this sort of thing, I'd be grateful if you'd think of me. I realise it is a new trade, but I'm not too old to learn it." This letter from AJP Taylor - written in the hope of joining the panel show In the News - seems to embody everything we now know about the first "TV don". It is ambitious
Source: http://heritage.scotsman.com
Dec 9, 2006
HISTORIC monuments are being "swamped" by new developments, ruining their setting and destroying valuable archaeological information, TV historian Mark Horton warned yesterday.
As he joined a campaign to stop houses being built around a ruined abbey, the presenter of the BBC's Coast said Scotland's heritage was under threat.
His concerns were welcomed by heritage experts who said development was threatening other important Scottish sites.
"Th
Source: Independent (UK)
Dec 9, 2006
The thing about the historian David Starkey - and God, he's going to absolutely hate me for saying this (he does have his reputation for being rude and a brute to think of) - is that he is just such a dream date. We had a terrific evening, or at least I did. I probably bored the arse off him, poor fellow, but he didn't bore me for a minute and there was champagne and wine and I got quite tipsy, although only in the most professional way, and then it was a lift home in his Daimler with its luxuri
Source: NYT
Dec 9, 2006
Robert Rosenblum, an influential and irreverent art historian and museum curator known for his research on subjects ranging from Picasso to images of dogs, died on Wednesday at his home in Greenwich Village. He was 79.
He died from complications of colon cancer, said his wife, the artist Jane Kaplowitz.
For half a century, Mr. Rosenblum taught in the undergraduate and graduate art history divisions at New York University, where he occupied an endowed chair as professor
Source: FrontpageMag.com
Dec 8, 2006
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund, and a columnist for The Washington Post. He is also the author of A Twilight Struggle: American Power and Nicaragua, 1977–1990, and editor, with William Kristol, of Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy. Kagan served in the U.S. State Department from 1984 to 1988. He is the author of the n
Source: NYT
Dec 8, 2006
George B. Tindall, a noted historian of the American South, died on Saturday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 85.
The cause was complications of diabetes, his daughter, Blair Tindall, said.
At his death, Professor Tindall was Kenan professor emeritus of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he had taught for more than 30 years.
Professor Tindall was known in particular for his work on the rise of the New South in the first h
Source: NYT
Dec 7, 2006
For some years now a theatrical troupe called the Reduced Shakespeare Company has made its living performing all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in just over an hour and a half. It’s a highbrow joke. In “Civilization,” Roger Osborne speeds through more than 40,000 years of Western history in just under 500 pages, minus bibliography and index. This is definitely not a joke, although it comes close to being a stunt, an intellectual high-wire act that the author pulls off with deceptive ease.
