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: Dutch News
Oct 17, 2006
Historians have come up with a checklist of 50 icons or windows to illustrate 3,000 years of Dutch history. Ranging from the megalithic tombs in Drenthe (hunebeds) to the euro, the aim of the Canon van Nederland is to outline what important elements in the development of the Netherlands could be taught at both a primary and secondary level.
The list takes the form of a flow chart through time and includes the first example of written Dutch, the Beemster polder and the Groningen nat
Source: WMU News (Western Michigan U.)
Oct 17, 2006
KALAMAZOO--A documentary film with Western Michigan University history professor Dr. Linda Borish serving as executive producer and historian had its premiere in early October.
Borish, professor of history and gender/women's studies, shares her expertise and research on American women's sport history in this first-ever film about Jewish women in American sport from the 1880s through the 20th century.
"Jewish Women in American Sport: Settlement Houses to the Olympic
Source: New Republic
Oct 17, 2006
[Richard Landes , medieval history professor at Boston University, established www.seconddraft.org and blogs at www.theaugeanstables.com. He is the author of Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (forthcoming). ]
On September 30, 2000, images of 12-year-old Mohammed Al Durah and his father--cowering behind a barrel at Netzarim Junction, in the Gaza Strip--circulated globally
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN
Oct 17, 2006
He's co-authored a book with Robert McNamara and was the first Western scholar to be given access to the archives in Hanoi, so it isn't surprising to learn that Vassar historian Robert K. Brigham sees parallels between Vietnam and Iraq. But he fairly shocked a small audience in Seattle today when he claimed that Condoleezza Rice is following in
Source: Jesse Lemisch post on Historians of American Communism list
Oct 16, 2006
After extended delay and embarrassing criticisms by many, Portside has
finally decided to take notice of former Communist Bettina Aptheker's
new book, Intimate Politics (see below). But the way they have backed
into this notice is reminiscent of the worst of Soviet journalism.
(Portside is the "discussion and debate service" of the Committees of
Correspondence, a descendant of the US Communist Party.) They have
presented a short piece by Aptheker with a rigged rebutt
Source: Andrew Ferguson in the Weekly Standard
Oct 16, 2006
I don't think anyone knows who the first person was to earn a living as a guide to Civil War battlefields, but no member of that charmed profession has achieved the fame or longevity of Edwin C. Bearss (pronounced Barsssss), who captained his first lucky group of tourists around Vicksburg in 1955 and can still be found, from one weekend to the next, at one battlefield or another, leading a fanny-packed and be-visored platoon of customers into the pleasures of vicarious combat.
Over
Source: Olivier Guitta in the Weekly Standard
Oct 16, 2006
[Olivier Guitta is a foreign affairs and counterterrorism consultant in Washington.]
ON SEPTEMBER 20, the State Department denied a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan on the grounds that he had contributed around 600 euros to a French charity classified as a terrorist organization since 2003 because of its relationship with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. This latest exclusion follows on the revocation of Ramadan's visa to live and work in the United States while teaching a
Source: Henry Kissinger in the NYT Book Review
Oct 15, 2006
Dean Acheson was perhaps the most vilified secretary of state in modern American history. Robert L. Beisner, in “Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War,” his sweeping and thoughtful account of Acheson’s tenure, cites a scholar who, with meticulous pedantry, discovered that during the four years — 1949-53 — that Acheson served as secretary of state, Republicans made 1,268 antagonistic statements about him on the Senate floor and only seven favorable ones (one wonders for what).
History
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 15, 2006
Thanks to a press officer's slip of the pen, The Independent on Sunday is sent to interview Simon Schama not at his literary agent's offices in London's Russell Street but to a rather grander building in Russell Square. It is a side entrance to the British Museum. When, 20 embarrassing minutes later, I relate this to Schama, he roars with laughter. "That's the introduction to your piece," he giggles: "We know Simon's pretentious - but regarding himself as an antiquity!"
Source: LAT
Oct 15, 2006
[BETTINA APTHEKER is a professor of feminist studies and history at UC Santa Cruz. She is the author, most recently, of Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel (Seal Press, Emeryville California, 2006).]
IT IS A LITTLE disconcerting and somewhat chilling to read reviews of my recently published memoir and see my own words quoted back to me. It is not because I don't like what I wrote, or feel shame about it. It is because I was the holder o
Source: Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times (UK)
Oct 13, 2006
Professor Peter Hennessy leads me past the stacks of books in the library at his home in Walthamstow, east London, to show me something special: a tea towel. It’s no ordinary tea towel, however. If Britain had been blown up by a nuclear bomb in the 1950s, this cream-and-green waffled cotton sheet would have dried Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s dishes.
Emblazoned on the tea towel are the letters TETW. “It’s an elaborate joke,” Hennessy cries. “They stand for The End of The World!”
Source: Wa Po
Oct 13, 2006
Michael Ignatieff, a former Harvard professor running for the leadership of Canada's Liberal Party, is facing a political uproar over remarks in which he labeled as a "war crime" Israel's deadly bombing of the southern Lebanon town of Qana.
Ignatieff, a noted human rights scholar and the front-runner in the race to lead the party, said in a French-language radio interview Sunday that the July 30 Qana bombing, which killed 28 civilians, "was a war crime, and I should h
Source: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
Oct 12, 2006
An encyclopedia article should be an objective accounting of a person's life and work. The wikipedia entry on me is constantly being distorted by a small group of far rightwing activists who put the comments of my ideological critics up into the body in an attempt to discredit me.
I never replied to the smear of me gotten up by Marty Peretz of the New Republic and carried out by a far rightwing Israeli historian named Ephraim Karsh, some time ago. It was beneath contempt.
Source: Eric Alterman in the Guardian
Oct 12, 2006
The British historian Tony Judt, transplanted to New York told a reporter this week:
"I'm struck when I observe the Jewish community in the United States, especially in New York ...that it's a community which is the most successful, the wealthiest, the most well-integrated, the most influential, the most safe Jewish community in the history of Judaism, period - anywhere, anytime - since the Roman empire. And yet it's driven by an enormous self-induced insecurity."
Source: NYT
Oct 12, 2006
The National Book Award finalists, announced yesterday, include “American Born Chinese” by Gene Luen Yang in the young people’s literature category, the first graphic novel to be nominated for a National Book Award. The winners will be announced in a ceremony on Nov. 15. In fiction, the finalists are Mark Z. Danielewski for “Only Revolutions”; Ken Kalfus for “A Disorder Peculiar to the Country”; Richard Powers for “The Echo Maker”; Dana Spiotta for “Eat the Document”; and Jess Walter for “The Ze
Source: NYT
Oct 11, 2006
Born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother, Edward Said, the writer and literary critic who died of leukemia in 2003, was perhaps fated to feel forever the outsider. In “Out of Place: Memories of Edward Said,” the director Sato Makoto examines the roots of his subject’s chronic alienation and sympathy for the Palestinian cause, visiting his childhood homes in Jerusalem, Cairo and Beirut, and encouraging the recollections of a wide variety of friends and family members.
Source: Todd Gitlin at the American Prospect blog
Oct 10, 2006
The NYU historian Tony Judt was invited to speak October 3 on the subject of “The Israel Lobby and U. S. Foreign Policy” to a discussion group entitled Network 20/20, which always holds its meetings at Manhattan’s Polish Consulate. But Judt received a call from Patricia Harrington, the president of the group, canceling his talk. She told Judt (as he recounted in a widely distributed e-mail) that the Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League, who “warned them off hosting anythin
Source: Press Release -- Oxford University Press (Niko Pfund)
Oct 10, 2006
Oxford University Press is deeply saddened by the news that Sheldon Meyer, Oxford’s legendary editor, passed away on October 9 after a long illness. Our thoughts are with his family and friends. It goes without saying that Sheldon Meyer’s career inspires many of us here at Oxford; Sheldon was the Maxwell Perkins of American history publishing, an editor who published many of Oxford’s most distinguished titles over the last forty years and won many a Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize. He made equally i
Source: Phareswire.com
Oct 10, 2006
In an interview with Radio Free Iraq, Middle East expert and Senior Fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Dr Walid Phares appealed to Iraqi academics and intellectuals to address their colleagues in the United States and express their real aspirations on democracy and freedom. Phares, who taught political science and Midle East studies at several Florida Universities since 1992, and who also taught in Beirut in the 1980s said he is speaking in the name of many American acade
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN's Cliopatria (blog)
Oct 10, 2006
I've long been proud of the fact that KC Johnson is one of the founding members of Cliopatria. He is featured in Kurt Anderson's"Rape, Justice, and the ‘Times'," New York Magazine, 16 October, an article that rips into the Times' coverage of the Duke lacrosse case. My favorite paragraphs:
In the movie, Tom Hanks would play K. C. Johnson. He's the most impressive of the"bloggers who have closely
