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: NYT
May 16, 2006
Jaroslav Jan Pelikan, a Yale scholar and historian of religion who interpreted Christian tenets to a vast lay audience in the English-speaking world, died on Saturday at his home in Hamden, Conn. He was 82.
The cause was lung cancer, said his son Michael.
A prolific author of essays and nearly 40 books, Dr. Pelikan joined the Yale faculty in 1962 and was appointed Sterling professor of history 10 years later. He wrote more than a dozen reference works covering the entir
Source: Wilfred M. McClay in the NY Sun
May 15, 2006
[Mr. McClay teaches history and humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.]
"The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" (William Morrow, 736 pages, $29.95) is the historian Douglas Brinkley's bid for literary and historical greatness. Hoping to follow in the footsteps of David McCullough, whose fine book on the Johnstown flood established his sterling historical reputation, Mr. Brinkley has sought to create an instant epic, pa
Source: Diane Coutu interview with Robert Caro in Harvard Business Review
May 15, 2006
Editor's note: Historian Robert A. Caro is a student of power, leadership, and the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States. In this Harvard Business Review excerpt from Diane Coutu's interview, Caro discusses Johnson's strategy for getting close to powerful people.
Why should business executives be interested in the life of Lyndon Johnson?
As far as I'm concerned, biography is a tool for understanding power: how it is acquired and how it is used
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, HNN Blog
May 15, 2006
I promise you that Jaroslav Pelikan is dead. He died two days ago. You may have heard it here first. And he'd better be dead, because the Orthodox intend to bury him tomorrow. But tell me: what other former president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences would be two days dead and not have an obit in the New York Times? What other Jefferson Lecturer would die and not have it noticed in the Washington Post? What other Gifford Lecturer would die without a notice in the London Times? What ot
Source: Duke University Website
May 14, 2006
This is the day of leave-taking on the part of you who have completed your studies here at Duke University, and I was greatly honored, Mr. President, when you invited me several months ago to say a few words on this occasion. Despite the fact that I have been attending commencement exercises for some 75 years, I find them as exciting as ever and, indeed, as important as ever, not only for the graduating classes themselves, but for all who take this opportunity to appreciate once more
Source: Ira Berlin in the NYT Book Review
May 14, 2006
... [T]he publication of David Brion Davis's "Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World" could not be more welcome. As much as any single scholar, Davis, a professor emeritus and the former director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, has made slavery a central element in modern historiography. Although the focus of "Inhuman Bondage" is largely on the Americas, he appreciates that the slavery
Source: David S. Brown in the LAT. (Mr. Brown is an associate professor of history at Elizabethtown College and author of "Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography," published last month)
May 14, 2006
THERE IS a certain mystique to Richard Hofstadter. For nearly 30 years, the legend goes, he wrote the best books, for the best publisher, won the best prizes and taught in the best city, at the best school, at the best time. Among his fellow historians, the memory of his brilliant three-decade tenure at Columbia University beginning just after World War II evokes a hazy attachment to a lost world of scholarly giants confident in the curative powers of the enlightened mind.
This was
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 11, 2006
At a Tehran airport on April 27, Iranian police arrested Ramin Jahanbegloo, a French-educated scholar who directs the department of contemporary thought at the Cultural Research Bureau, a think tank in Tehran. Mr. Jahanbegloo is the author of books on Hegel, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Isaiah Berlin; he has been a fellow at Harvard University and has taught at the University of Toronto.
No formal charges have been issued, but newspapers aligned with the Iranian regime have denounced Mr
Source: John Mearsheimer & Stephen Walt in the London Review of Books
May 11, 2006
We wrote ‘The Israel Lobby’ in order to begin a discussion of a subject that had become difficult to address openly in the United States (LRB, 23 March). We knew it was likely to generate a strong reaction, and we are not surprised that some of our critics have chosen to attack our characters or misrepresent our arguments. We have also been gratified by the many positive responses we have received, and by the thoughtful commentary that has begun to emerge in the media and the blogosphere. It is
Source: NY Review of Books
May 11, 2006
The following letter was sent to Michael Chertoff, US Secretary of Homeland Security, and Condoleezza Rice, US Secretary of State, on February 22, 2006.
Dear Secretary Chertoff and Secretary Rice:
We are writing on behalf of the Department of History and the Institute for Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to express our dismay over the US government's refusal to issue a visa to Dr. Waskar Ari to allow him to accept the position of
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 10, 2006
... Democracy Past and Future, the selection of [French Thinker Pierre Rosanvallon's] writings just published by Columbia University Press, provides a long overdue introduction to a figure who defies both sound bites and the familiar academic division of labor. Born in 1948, he spent much of the 1970s as a sort of thinker-in-residence for a major trade union, the Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail, for which he organized seminars and conferences seeking to create a non-Marxist “seco
Source: San Jose Mercury News
May 10, 2006
As one of Stanford University's most respected Middle East scholars, professor Joel Beinin knows what terrorism looks like.
So it was a shock when he saw his own face on the cover of a new book titled ``Campus Support for Terrorism,'' linking him to radical Islam.
He's suing the book's publishers in what is the first counteroffensive by a professor against a growing campaign by conservative groups targeting left-leaning college educators.
Conservative group
Source: "Facts Count," a response to David Horowitz's book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America
May 9, 2006
["Facts Count" was prepared by Free Exchange. The introduction to the website where the following entry was posted says: "Free Exchange has taken a close look at David Horowitz’s new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, and found a trail of errors and misrepresentations. We will be documenting these here at Free Exchange with interviews and analyses based on the book. Each response will be archived to help readers see how inaccurate Horowitz’s represe
Source: San Antonio Express-News
May 9, 2006
A historian dismisses some of the changes anti-immigration groups want as simplistic and ill-informed.
Source: Juan Cole at his blog, Informed Comment
May 9, 2006
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran
c/o H.E. Javad Zarif
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Permanent Mission of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations
Fax: 212-867-7086
Your Excellency:
We write to you on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) and the Committee on Academic and Intellectual Freedom of the Internat
Source: Interviewer Tom Engelhardt at TomDispatch.com
May 9, 2006
His short hair and mustache are heavily flecked with grey, but he still retains the stocky, powerful build of a butcher's son, who once, long ago, hauled animal carcasses for his father in the San Diego suburb of El Cajon. At a moment's notice, he puts you in his four-wheel drive and takes you out to San Diego's McMansion exurbs or down to the Mexican border and right up to the new, controversial triple fence just being erected (where you have a passing run-in with the Border Patrol). He is th
Source: Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker
May 8, 2006
... What is missing from the Nixon Library and Birthplace is an actual library. In 1974, Congress impounded forty-four million of Nixon’s Presidential papers and almost four thousand hours of his tapes. There was an entirely reasonable belief at the time that Nixon could not be trusted with his own papers. So the California library was opened, in 1990, without the documentary record of Nixon’s Presidency. It was administered not by the National Archives, which oversees the nation’s eleven other
Source: D.M. Giangreco at AmericanThinker.com
May 8, 2006
Three weeks ago, Robert J. Maddox outlined for American Thinker readers the “contentious debate” swirling around the awarding of the Ferrell Book Prize by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR) to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa for Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan—- and the bullets are still flying. Robert P. Newman’s “Has the History Profession Awarded a Prize to Another Flawed Book?’” on the History News Network is paired with a response by Hasegawa a
Source: Jesse Lemisch, in an email circulating on the Internet
May 6, 2006
Dear Fellow Historians (and a few others):
Below is a statement from the Campaign for Peace and Democracy, which I have signed, opposing both theocratic repression in Iran and US aggression there. I think this intelligent statement can play a very positive role in shaping public discussion on this increasingly urgent situation. Historians among the initial signers include: Ros Baxandall, Eileen Boris, Martin Duberman, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Rusti Eisenberg, Linda Gordon, Adam Hochsch
Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com
May 5, 2006
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Efraim Karsh, the author of the new book Islamic Imperialism: A History. He is a professor and head of the Mediterranean Studies Programme, King’s College, University of London. He has published extensively and often served as a consultant on Middle Eastern affairs, Soviet foreign policy, and European neutrality. His books include Empires of the Sand: The Struggle for Mastery in the Middle East, 1789-1923 and Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography.
