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: William R. Hawkins at frontpagemag.com
Jun 15, 2006
... Today, the Left is looking for a new champion to “contain” the United States, and, if possible, impose such a major defeat on America that a crisis of legitimacy will pave the way for revolution. It was, after all, Russia’s debacle in World War I that brought down the Romanov dynasty. And aging New Leftists still revel in how much the anti-war movement during Vietnam changed America, even if the desire to “turn the guns around” and “bring the war home” did not pan out. The attempt to recreat
Source: Joseph Frank in the course of reviewing Pipes's Russian Conservatism and Its Critics: A Study in Political Culture and Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger; in the New Republic
Jun 14, 2006
Richard Pipes has had an extremely distinguished career both as a historian specializing in Russian history and culture and as a member of the Reagan administration. These books deal with both these aspects of his life, and one helps to illuminate the other. His views on Russian history, particularly as they related to the Soviet Union, attracted the attention of politicians such as Senator Henry Jackson, and he was invited to testify before Senate commissions and finally to accept a temporary p
Source: National Review Online
Jun 14, 2006
This just in: We’re going to win the war on terror. Or so University of Dayton history professor Larry Schweikart says. He is author of the new book, America’s Victories: Why the U.S. Wins Wars and Will Win the War on Terror and thinks the case is made in American military and political history. Schweikart went through some of it in an interview with National Review Online editor Kathryn Lopez.
Kathryn Jean Lopez: So why does the U.S. win wars?
Larry Schweikart: The gli
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Jun 13, 2006
ALL Souls College, Oxford, announced yesterday that it was not prepared to relocate a sundial designed by Sir Christopher Wren in order to receive a bequest from a former fellow who made it a condition of his will.
The Daily Telegraph reported yesterday that Dr John Simmons, an Oxford academic and All Souls historian who died last year aged 90, had left his old college an undisclosed sum from his pounds 880,000 estate, but only if the sundial was put back to its former position in
Source: Guardian
Jun 13, 2006
The French aren't noted for their willingness to defer to the Brits, but for John Keiger, professor of international history and director of the European Studies Research Institute at Salford University, they appear to be making an exception. "I do have a fair amount of experience of French and British university systems," he says, "so I suppose I have been brought in to bring an outsider's perspective to the issues and to stir things up. Employers and students have lost faith in
Source: Christianity Today
Jun 12, 2006
Faithful readers may recall the parallel-universe cabinet proposed in our 2004 election issue (the one with "Bono for President" on the cover), which included Mark Noll as Secretary of History: "Imagine the president meeting every two weeks, say, with his historian. Everyone else around him is focused relentlessly on the present, not least on the ever-proliferating opinion polls. When his advisers venture into history, they generally do so in the spirit of a raid—to rip from its c
Source: Independent (UK)
Jun 12, 2006
Mark Perlman was an influential historian of economic thought, the co-author with Charles McCann Jnr of The Pillars of Economic Understanding - the first volume published under the subtitle "Ideas and Traditions" (1998), the second as "Factors and Markets" (2000). He was also the founding editor ofthe Journal of Economic Literature, a leader in its genre, and created a journal for the US De-partmentofState, PortfolioonInterna-tionalEconomic Perspectives, as well as a journal
Source: Independent (UK)
Jun 12, 2006
As a church historian, Jaroslav Pelikan fought all his life to overcome Christians' amnesia of their own past - not only Protestants' ignorance of Reformation history, but Western Christians' ignorance of the Eastern Christian heritage, Christians' ignorance of Christianity's Jewish past and Christians' and Jews' ignorance of their Classical Greek heritage.
Pelikan's magnum opus was The Christian Tradition: ahistory of the development of doctrine, published in f
Source: Johann Hari in the Independent (UK)
Jun 12, 2006
Next week, Channel 4 will broadcast a startlingly obscene television series. A handsome historian will walk around the rubble and mass graves of Soviet Russia and declare with an aggressive smile, "If it hadn't been Stalin, it might have been somebody worse. In any case, Russia has been ruled by murderous despots for centuries and centuries, so you might as well cast a moral judgement on rain as on Stalin." He will argue that the collapse of Stalinism was "one of the great tragedi
Source: Martin E. Marty in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin E. Marty Center at the University of Chiacgo
Jun 12, 2006
... Mark Noll, a superior historian who just moved from Wheaton College to the University of Notre Dame, knows Canadian religion as few U.S. scholars do, and made it the subject of his presidential address to the American Society of Church History, whose journal Church History (June 2006) published it. I hope my mention of it will prompt a visit to the library or the study of your friendly neighborhood church historian. Line one: "What happened to Christian Canada?" Line two: Noll a
Source: Informed Comment (blog)
Jun 9, 2006
I am not going to talk about the Yale affair per se.
But I did want to clear up some misimpressions I've seen here and there.
First, it should be remembered that senior professors are sort of like baseball players, and other teams look at them from time to time, as recruitment prospects. It goes on constantly, formally or informally. Such looking is never taken very seriously by anyone unless it eventuates in an actual offer.
Second, it is important in in
Source: Interview in Jerusalem Post by Ruthie Blum
Jun 9, 2006
In Israel last month to receive the "Guardian of Zion" award from Bar-Ilan University's Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies, Middle East scholar and author Daniel Pipes pulled no punches. In his acceptance speech at the King David Hotel before a distinguished gathering of academics, politicians, business people and the media, Pipes did something that - while perhaps, par for his own lonely course of late - was unconventional to say the least. It certainly strayed from the pro forma po
Source: Harvard Gazette
Jun 8, 2006
American democracy is not a static, unchanging phenomenon, but rather an ongoing argument said Sean Wilentz, this year's Phi Beta Kappa orator.
Because of its evolving nature, democracy is not something that can be easily exported, nor does it come about automatically as the result of overthrowing tyranny, he said.
"Our own history shows differently," said Wilentz, the Dayton-Stockon Professor of History at Princeton University and author of "The Rise o
Source: dw-world
Jun 8, 2006
In an interview with DW-WORLD.DE, US historian Timothy Naftali says Germans should pressure their own government to receive more information on the role of Nazis in German government after 1945.
The US Central Intelligence Agency~recently declassified some 27,000 pages of its operational records from the post-World War II era. At the time, the US covered up the identities of ex-Nazis and used them as spies against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Timothy Naftali i
Source: David Greenberg in Slate
Jun 7, 2006
[David Greenberg writes the "History Lesson" column and teaches at Rutgers University. He is the author of Nixon's Shadow: The History of an Image.]
"The paranoid style in American politics." … "Status anxiety." … "Anti-intellectualism in American life." … "Third parties are like bees: Once they have stung they die." —Richard Hofstadter.
Richard Hofstadter's name is cited a lot in our political culture—a lot, at least,
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, HNN Blog
Jun 5, 2006
Let me give you a hypothetical: Let's say that, at a major research university, its program in modern European history had aged to the point that it had only one remaining senior scholar in the field. The institution decides that it wants to strengthen its program in modern European history. Its remaining senior Europeanist recommends to his colleagues and administrators that a respected scholar from another institution be hired. When he does that, however, word goes out from hostile quarters:"Y
Source: Reuel Marc Gerecht in the Weekly Standard
Jun 5, 2006
[Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.]
IT IS OFTEN SAID THAT the United States isn't easy on its scholars and public intellectuals--that they are not accorded the prestige and respect that they are given in the Old World. This complaint, usually made by left-wingers struggling against the tide in the United States, isn't totally without merit. A good literary scholar or classicist in the United
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jun 5, 2006
S. Frederick Starr is by any measure that rare academic whose success mixes administrative work (former president of Oberlin College and the Aspen Institute) and top-level scholarship (leading expert on the Soviet Union, Russia and the countries in Central Asia that were created when the Soviet Union fell apart). A talented jazz musician, he’s also mixed that interest with his scholarship — and his lectures and op-eds make him a highly successful public intellectual as well.
In the
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jun 5, 2006
One of the most closely watched — and criticized — faculty searches this academic year is ending with Juan Cole apparently being rejected for a post in Middle Eastern history at Yale University.
Cole is a professor of history at the University of Michigan and president of the Middle East Studies Association. He also has one of the largest audiences of Middle Eastern studies experts through his blog, Informed Comment, on which he publishes numerous updates a day about events in the M
Source: Vanguard
Jun 4, 2006
Professor Ernest Emenyonu, a notable critic, theorist and writer is chair, Africana Studies of The University of Michigan, Flint in the United States of America. As a critic, Professor Emenyonu has written very constructive works that have added meaning and depth to the Igbo, Nigerian and African literature. His very important landmark critical work, The Rise of The Igbo Novel, is no doubt one of the most important studies not only in Igbo indigenous literature, but has also helped in igniting
