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: San Francisco Chronicle
Aug 2, 2006
Lynn Downey lives for yesterday.
As the historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, she has spent 17 years retracing the company's past, which dates to 1853, when Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss opened a wholesale dry-goods business, selling merchandise to general stores throughout the West. It has been Downey's job to chronicle how the company got from there to here over 153 years. At Levi's, she oversees a vast collection of records, in the form of
Source: Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine
Aug 1, 2006
David Blackbourn has an affection for fens and marshes, lush, low-lying polders and high moors of heath and bog. When he leaves his home in Lexington, Massachusetts, to visit the coast, he and his wife walk the creeks and saltmarshes of Essex and Gloucester, north of Boston. The sights and smells of such places, she says, induce in him a kind of reverie. Blackbourn’s sense of personal connection to well-watered lowlands perhaps owes something to his early years, growing up in England, in Lincoln
Source: The History Librarian (blog)
Aug 1, 2006
Pierre Vidal-Naquet, French historian and activist, died this past weekend; he was 76. So far, there are obituaries in Le Monde and Libération (there’s also a second, longer piece in Libération), but I have not seen any English-language obituaries as y
Source: Rachel Brune, writing in BlackAnthem.com
Aug 1, 2006
Blackanthem Military News, AL HADR, Iraq – Even as he is mired in the present concerns of coordinating logistics for Q-West Base Complex, Capt. Jesse Ballenger, 153rd Field Artillery Brigade, has one eye on the future.
Ballenger keeps another eye on the past, a consequence of his ongoing studies in archaeology as a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Arizona.
With his current project at the Hatra ruins, the Army National Guardsman and Norman, Okla., native is bringing
Source: Email from Bruce Craig to NCH board members
Aug 1, 2006
Dear NCH Policy Board, All Member Organizations, and Friends of the NCH:
During the meeting of the National Coalition for History (NCH) Policy
Board this morning, I announced that effective 1 January 2007, I will be
resigning as Executive Director of the history coalition as my wife
Patricia and I will be permanently moving to Prince Edward Island, Canada.
As many of you know, we have a summer home near East Point, PEI
(actually, Northlake Harbor --"the tuna capitol of the wo
Source: Africa Today
Jul 31, 2006
The United Kingdom's defence ministry has categorically refused to release papers, which historians say may sort out the 53-year-old whodunit of a massacre involving UK troops at the height of the war against Mau Mau liberation fighters in Kenya. In an all out offensive to trounce the Mau Mau liberation fighters who the British then labelled 'insurgents', the Somali members of a loyalist militia group recruited to fight an all-too-powerful resistance and audacious guerrilla army, slaughtered 20
Source: Wa Po
Jul 31, 2006
On a recent Monday in Hyattsville, as bleary-eyed drivers made their morning commute, Allan Lichtman was already breaking into a sweat trying to get their attention.
In pinstriped pants, a white-and-blue striped shirt and red tie, he stood on a small sliver of concrete median at a hot and humid intersection. With every passing car, he waved his hands and peered into the windows with a smile, as if to say: C'mon, give me something -- a wave, a honk, anything.
This is wha
Source: Baltimore Sun
Jul 30, 2006
Among his colleagues at the Naval Academy, there is a running joke circulating about Craig Symonds.
When Harrison Ford came to Annapolis in 1991 to shoot a few scenes for Patriot Games, he shadowed Symonds for a couple of days to sample the life of a civilian history professor at the military college. And when the movie was shot, they used his classroom.
That brought some ribbing from fellow professors, who joked that Symonds - like Jack Ryan, the CIA agent turned ac
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2006
Keith R. DeVries, an archaeologist and authority on the excavation of Gordion, the ancient Turkish city once ruled by King Midas of the golden touch, died on July 16 in Philadelphia. He was 69.
The cause was cancer, his family said.
From 1977 to 1987, Dr. DeVries directed the University of Pennsylvania’s dig at Gordion, where members of the staff of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the university have been at work since the 1950’s. Gordion is about 55 miles
Source: NYT
Jul 29, 2006
Louise Simone Bennett-Coverly, a Jamaican poet and folklorist who became the voice of the island’s culture at home and abroad, died on Wednesday in Toronto. She was 86.
Her death was announced by the Jamaica Information Service, which did not give a cause. She was hospitalized in Toronto after collapsing late Tuesday night.
A social commentator who liberally used Jamaican patois and made famous the Jamaican catchphrase “Walk good,” she brought an overwhelming talent to
Source: Stephen Hahn in the New Republic in the course of a review of Foner's Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction (Knopf)
Jul 28, 2006
... [Eric] Foner is the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, where he has been for most of his adult life. Like his mentor Richard Hofstadter, he has had an enormous influence on how other historians, as well as a good cut of the general reading public, have come to think about American history. This is the result of his voluminous scholarship and of his decades as a teacher. Indeed, when one considers the chronological and topical range of Foner's many books and essays--n
Source: Email from Rachelle Lacroix of the National Book Festival
Jul 28, 2006
My name is Rachelle Lacroix and I am contacting History News Network on behalf of the National Book Festival. I wanted to get in touch with you because I thought the HNN audience would be interested in learning about an opportunity to meet and interact with many of the nation's most beloved writers, artists and storytellers at the National Book Festival this September in Washington, DC. I've pasted the full, official press release at the bottom of this email for your review which includes a lis
Source: Jacob Laskin at frontpagemag.com
Jul 28, 2006
Question: What’s the difference between the Arab League and the academic Left that despises Israel? Answer: Only the Arab League is willing to condemn Hezbollah.
The surreal politics of this war finds Saudi Arabia attributing “full responsibility” to Hezbollah and calling on the terrorists to “alone shoulder the crisis they have created;” it finds Kuwaiti journalists lauding the “operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon [that] are in the interest of people of Arab countries and the
Source: Email sent to HAW members
Jul 27, 2006
The Steering Committee of Historians Against the War deplores the role of the U.S. government in widening the circle of violence in the Middle East. We condemn the Bush Administration’s senseless quest for military solutions to the region’s problems exemplified by the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic and material aid for the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and threats of military action against Iran. We call upon Congress and the Bush Administration to support an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon/Israel
Source: Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed
Jul 27, 2006
Saoud El Mawla was a year late in accepting a position as professor at Earlham College. He was supposed to start in the 2003-4 academic year. But the tightening of visa rules post-9/11 meant that Lebanese citizens like El Mawla were unable to get the necessary documents to come to the United States. It didn’t matter that El Mawla has been hired to teach peace studies, and was an outspoken advocate for non-violent solutions to the problems of the Middle East. It took nearly a year of negotiations
Source: John Sutherland in the Guardian
Jul 25, 2006
When Tony Blair came to office in 1997 he relied for intellectual muscle on sociologists such as Tony Giddens - the LSE don who strategised the "third way". Nearly a decade later, as his "legacy" looms, it is the historians who are summing up the Blair years, bringing in their verdicts. Among them is David Runciman, who formulates his critique of Blair, post-9/11, as "the politics of good intentions". What, I ask him, does the phrase mean?
"It's no
Source: John Tierney in the NYT
Jul 25, 2006
To Hezbollah, there is no such thing as “collateral damage” from its missiles. Israel keeps telling the world that its army aims only at military targets, but Hezbollah doesn’t even pretend to. Its soldiers proudly fire away at civilians.
These terrorists consider themselves men of honor, and unfortunately they are — by their own definition. We in the West can call them barbaric, which they also are, but they’re following an ancient social code, even if we can’t recognize it anymore
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jul 24, 2006
With the debut of his Web log, Informed Comment, four years ago, Juan R.I. Cole became arguably the most visible commentator writing on the Middle East today. A professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and president of the Middle East Studies Association, Cole has voiced strong opposition to the war in Iraq and to the treatment of the Palestinians, garnering him plaudits from the left and condemnation from supporters of Israel and Preside
Source: Scott McLemee at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Jul 23, 2006
There has been a controversy, of sorts, over whether or not the standard edition of Upton Sinclair's muckraking classic The Jungle is the product of changes imposed on the author by his publisher. That is the claim of See Sharp Press, which publishes what it dubs The Jungle: The Uncensored Original Edition, based on the serialized version of the novel as it first ran in 1905. The book offered by See Sharp is somewhat longer than the text issued by a commercial press the next year.
Source: Michelle Grattan in the Australian Age
Jul 23, 2006
Does your child know when James Cook sailed up the Australian coast? That's what Education Minister Julie Bishop is asking kids she meets. Hardly any have the answer, which is confirming the Government's view that Australian history has gone missing in our schools.
Governments like to call "summits" on every damn thing. Still, the August 17 one-day Australian History Summit might at first blush seem an odd enterprise. Not, however, if you are John Howard and your agenda in
