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: George Weigel in Tidings Online
Jul 7, 2006
This Fourth of July comes during a year in which fretting about the impact on the life of the Republic of "theocons" and "theocrats" (a.k.a., "serious Christian believers") has become a blood sport - with more bloodletting likely in the months ahead. That makes it a good moment to reflect, with British historian Michael Burleigh, on what Christianity gave the West, of which the United States is one important expression.
Professor Burleigh proposes that
Source: Press Release -- Allan Lichtman Campaign
Jul 7, 2006
A new Washington Post poll shows that Maryland's U. S. Senate race is wide open, with about a third of voters undecided.
Support for Cong. Ben Cardin has cratered since the last independent poll taken about two months ago, as Allan Lichtman's demonstration of the flaws in his record has struck home with voters. Cardin's percentage among registered Democrats has plummeted by 14 points, as nearly 40 percent of his support has melted away. His support is down to 25 percent - an astoni
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jul 7, 2006
An art historian at Columbia University says the Metropolitan Museum of Art paid $50-million last year for a 19th-century painting that only appears to be the work of the early Italian master known as Duccio. According to The Times of London, the Columbia professor, James Beck, says the painting, which depicts the Madonna and Child, does not resemble any of the handful of known works by Duccio, a 14th-century painter who is regarded as one of the founders of Renaissance art.
Source: News Today
Jul 6, 2006
The 19th century was the century in which the craft of history became a thoroughly modern profession. It was the Age of great historians - of Ranke and Mommsen, Burckhardt and Fustel de Caulanges, Macaulay and Maitland, and of that great subverter of accepted pieties, Karl Marx. All these great historians and writers produced imperishable masterpieces, defining new fields and bringing new methods and new perspectives to familiar subject matter. Their books have become imperishable for two reason
Source: Australian
Jul 6, 2006
THE ABC's decision not to publish a biography about broadcaster Alan Jones was regrettable and pointless, a historian of the national broadcaster says.
Emeritus Professor Ken Inglis, who wrote a history of the ABC, said yesterday he was concerned that the ABC's decision not to publish the book by long-standing Four Corners journalist Chris Masters could be used to stop the broadcast of controversial programs.
Jonestown was commissioned by ABC Enterprises, which raises m
Source: David Garrow in Newsday
Jul 5, 2006
... In Atlanta, local cheerleaders hailed the purchase as a municipal triumph. The papers will remain in the city King called home, with their ultimate destination his alma mater, Morehouse College. But the cheering obscures serious problems that the sale does not resolve and may exacerbate.
What will be the fate of the rest of King's Atlanta papers? What kind of access will be provided to the papers already sold? And what precedent does this sale set for other historical collection
Source: Taylor Branch op ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jul 5, 2006
All Atlantans can rightly celebrate Mayor Shirley Franklin and the donors who have pledged to keep 7,000 historical treasures together in the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s home city. But these leaders have assumed a responsibility that goes far beyond money and civic pride. A noble work teeters precariously, less than half-done, and the whole world has a stake in the outcome.Hidden conditions imposed by the King family helped frustrate two previous sales that would have prese
Source: Press Release
Jul 5, 2006
CHESTERTOWN, MD - Washington College has appointed historian and essayist Adam Goodheart as the new director of the College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, the Office of the President announced Wednesday, July 5. Goodheart, who served as a visiting fellow of the Center during the past four years, succeeds Ted Widmer, a presidential historian and former speechwriter for the Clinton Administration's National Security Council, who directed the Center since its inceptio
Source: Guardian
Jul 4, 2006
The coffee table in Lord Skidelsky's office, near the House of Lords, is strewn with weighty publications. Among them are the Economist, the International Herald Tribune and a fat slab of hardback: Niall Ferguson's The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred. His lordship is a reviewer for the New Statesman, Prospect and the New York Review of Books. He places another tome on his desk with a thud, briefly removes his jacket to reveal a natty pair of gold-embossed red braces, and complains: &qu
Source: Boston Globe
Jul 3, 2006
Wiry and energetic, the Hugo K. Foster Associate Professor of African Studies at Harvard University coils in her chair and speaks with rapid force about her book that recently won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize.
"I was strongly urged by colleagues not to undertake this project, for two reasons," Caroline Elkins said in an interview at her home, not far from the campus. "One, they felt it was too politically sensitive. Two, they said there wouldn't be enough information. So,
Source: Philip Weiss in the Nation
Jul 3, 2006
Mr. Weiss is the author of American Taboo: A Murder in the Peace Corps (Harper Perennial).
Neoconservatism is an elite calling. It thrives in think tanks, not union halls; its proponents want most of all to influence the powerful. No wonder Ivy League labels have always been important to neocons. This fixation on intellectual prestige explains the recent neocon uprising over the possibility that Juan Cole, scholar and blogger, would become a Yale professor. It was one thing for Col
Source: Detroit Free Press
Jul 2, 2006
Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis, the dean of American Middle East scholars, flatly predicts that Europe will be Muslim by the end of this century.
George Weigel, a leading American theologian, frets about "a Europe in which the muezzin summons the faithful to prayer from the central loggia of St. Peter's in Rome, while Notre Dame has been transformed into Hagia Sophia on the Seine -- a great Christian church" will "become an Islamic museum."
L
Source: Mark Yost in the Philadelphia Inquirer
Jul 2, 2006
Even the most vehement critics of the war on terror will admit that our soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are some of the best that have ever stepped onto a battlefield. University of Dayton history professor Larry Schweikart argues that America's troops have always overcome adversity, poor equipment and yes, unpopularity to win wars and do so with aplomb.
How and why are detailed well in his new book, America's Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terro
Source: LAT
Jul 2, 2006
When Vern Bullough was asked what launched him into the field of sexual history 50 years ago, he quipped, "I blame it all on my mother-in-law."
His future wife's mother had abandoned her family to live in a committed relationship with another woman — a scandalous event for Salt Lake City in the mid-1940s.
Bullough, then a teenager, was "more or less goggle-eyed" when he met them, but quickly quit gawking and began educating himself. He plied the tw
Source: Kleeb Campaign Website
Jul 1, 2006
As a fourth generation Nebraskan, Scott Kleeb has deep roots in three great traditions of this state: agriculture, patriotism and public service.
Scott's great-grandfather, Albert Kleeb, was born in a dug-out outside of Broken Bow, Nebraska, before the turn of the century. He once hiked three days to earn 20 ewes and a dollar in exchange for his farm goods. This windfall was to be the origins of the Kleeb family farm and ranch, which stood outside of Broken Bow for nearly 100 years.
Source: Common-Place.org
Jul 1, 2006
Henry Wiencek is the author of the acclaimed An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history and the Best Book of 2003 award from the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic.
Common-place: One of the striking revelations in Imperfect God is just how intertwined Washington's life was with the institution of slavery. Everyone knows he owned slaves, but few recognize just how pervas
Source: Boston Globe
Jun 30, 2006
Timothy Naftali, a historian at the University of Virginia who has written on American counter-terrorism policy, has proposed a measure that he thinks could make releasing detainees [from Guantanamo] less of a gamble.
The fact that we can't charge a low-level Taliban or al Qaeda member with a crime, he argues, doesn't mean we have to keep him locked up. Why not let him go but keep track of him?
Naftali's model is a co-ordinated, decades-long operation carried out by Ame
Source: Jon Wiener in Inside Higher Ed
Jun 30, 2006
Ward Churchill should be fired for academic misconduct — that’s the decision made by the interim chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, after receiving a report from a faculty committee concluding that Churchill is guilty of falsification, fabrication and plagiarism. That report shows that, even under difficult political conditions, it’s possible to do a good job dealing with charges of research misconduct. The Colorado report on Churchill provides a striking contrast to the flawed
Source: Dr. History (blog)
Jun 29, 2006
I was doing some random searching last week and came across noindoctrination.org. This is one of those websites that allows students who feel like their professors or schools are pushing "sociopolitical agendas" and "supplanting, suppressing, and ultimately excluding alternative views" a place to publicly air their grievances.
I didn't find very many of the stories I examined that compelling, but what did interest me was that close to 30% of those listed on the s
Source: Scott McLemee at HNN blog Cliopatria
Jun 29, 2006
In the months after 9/11, you started hearing more and more references to Robert Kaplan as the closest thing to a geopolitical thinker to come from the ranks of roving journalistic correspondents -- apart from Tom Friedman, of course. They became the Mutt and Jeff of American punditry.
Friedman emphasizes trade and diplomacy; exhibits a rather straightforward appreciation of technology as a driving factor in human progress; is, in his most optimistic moments, prone to evoking a global futur
