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: Michael Hill in the Balt Sun
Apr 16, 2006
The United States military overwhelms an outmatched opponent, easily taking the capital city of a country half a world away. Mission accomplished; or so it seems.
Actually, it was the beginning of a protracted guerrilla war, years of bloody fighting that led to allegations of brutality on the battlefield and widespread protests and political controversy at home.
It is not Iraq that Johns Hopkins University historian Paul Kramer is writing about; it is the Philippines. H
Source: NYT
Apr 14, 2006
Government lawyers clarified some mysteries yesterday and deepened others in the case of Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss Muslim scholar and leading European theologian of Islam who has been barred by the Bush administration from traveling to the United States since July 2004.
Papers the government presented at a hearing in federal court in New York revealed that, contrary to officials' statements, a clause in the USA Patriot Act that bans any foreigner who "endorses or espouses terroris
Source: Bruce Craig in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Apr 14, 2006
On 10 April 2006, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein announced the appointment of presidential historian Timothy Naftali to serve as the first director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Naftali, who is currently Associate Professor and Director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs, will assume his duties on 16 October 2006.
Educated at Yale University and Joh
Source: The Daily Telegraph
Apr 13, 2006
Just days after being cleared by the High Court, author Dan Brown faces new accusations of plagiarism.
Russian art historian Dr Mikhail Anikin - a Leonardo Da Vinci expert at the Hermitage - is demanding an apology from Brown and a right to half the money made from The Da Vinci Code.
"Anikin claims he'll sue Brown in Russia and the US,'' says my Stateside source. "He says that in his book, Leonardo Da Vinci: Theology in Paint, published in 2000, he argues the Mona Lisa
Source: Guardian (UK)
Apr 13, 2006
Just on the stroke of the millennium, the Lancaster University historian Dr Marcus Merriman, who has died aged 65, produced the classic that friends had for years urged him to bring to birth. The Rough Wooings: Mary Queen of Scots, 1542-1551 (2000), was the fruit of years of reflection, and of teaching with research - affirming the mutual support that the one ought to have of the other. And in 2001, the Saltire Society made Rough Wooings its best Scottish history book of the year.
Source: newswire
Apr 12, 2006
Historian Paul Kramer, in his new book "The Blood of Government," details the long-forgotten history of the Philippine-American war and the 40-year occupation that followed. He argues that the Philippine adventure in many ways parallels the current U.S. occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was Mark Twain who said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” Few today remember that the celebrated author was also a vocal critic of a U.S. war of empire a century ago: the
Source: Daniel Pipes in the NY Sun
Apr 11, 2006
[Mr. Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum. His website address is http://www.danielpipes.org. Click here for his HNN blog.]
When assessing the state of higher education in America, such problems as the Harvard faculty's ouster of its president or the unhinged radicalism of
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 10, 2006
[Editor's Note updated 4-13-06: Laura Bier wrote this article under the pseudonym Leah Bowman. She was identified by the Chronicle as an assistant professor who teaches Middle East history at a research university in the South. The historian Martin Kramer subsequently publicly identified her. Ms. Bier objected to our identification of her. On 4-13-06 the Chronicle demanded that we delete the excerpt we posted on 4-10-06:"We do not permit Chronicle articles to be edited or excerpted without the
Source: Martin E. Marty in Sightings, the newsletter of the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Apr 10, 2006
"Jesus, Jesus and More Jesus ... Jesus is all the rage in the media these days," writes Lynn Garrett in Publishers Weekly Religion BookLine. She's right. You can save time by reading Garry Wills's terse What Jesus Meant, a typical Willsian "makes you think" book; you can then skip the new Gnostic "Gospel of Judas," the search for the "real" historical Jesus, all of the Jesus-as-nice-guy sentimentalities, "gentle Jesus meek and mild," the Da Vin
Source: USnewswire.com
Apr 10, 2006
Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein announced today the designation of presidential historian Timothy Naftali as the first director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California. Professor Naftali, who is currently Associate Professor and Director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center for Public Affairs, will assume his duties on October 16, 2006.
In making the announcement, the Archivist sai
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
Apr 9, 2006
Before the war, the U.S. State Department estimates, Baghdad residents enjoyed more than 16 hours of electricity each day. Last month, they averaged eight.
Iraq's employment rate, according to Iraqi and U.S. government data, is as low as it has been at any time since the American-led invasion. And oil production, over the past three months, was lower than in any quarter since the capture of Saddam Hussein.
Sherman Fleek isn't quite ignoring such data, but as he constructs t
Source: History Today
Apr 7, 2006
Gerald Fleming was born Gerhard Flehinger in Baden-Baden in 1921. His German-Jewish background would strongly influence his academic life and lead to his legacy as one of Europe’s foremost Holocaust historians. The family moved to England following his father’s US manoeuvred release from a concentration camp, soon after the Nazi party’s rise to power. At the start of World War II he was briefly detained in Canada but returned to England to work in a munitions factory. He began his teaching caree
Source: Forbes
Apr 7, 2006
Doris Kearns Goodwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose best sellers include "No Ordinary Time" and "Wait Till Next Year," received a standing ovation from a roomful of Abraham Lincoln experts, the kind of people who usually look suspiciously upon popular authors. Goodwin's "Team of Rivals," her acclaimed biography of Abraham Lincoln and the former political foes who became members of his cabinet, was this year's winner of the Lincoln P
Source: Josef Joffe at the website of the New Republic
Apr 6, 2006
Two political scientists, John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard, have recently sallied forth with a paper that puts The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to shame. The gist is that the "Israel Lobby," the core of which "is comprised of American Jews," keeps "bending U.S. foreign policy so that it advances Israel's interests." As a result, the Jews have jeopardized not only U.S. security, but that of much of the rest of the world.
Source: Oliver Kamm at his blog
Apr 5, 2006
THIS MONTH, the American Society of Historians for Foreign Relations will honour the author of a recent work on the role of the atom bomb in Japan’s defeat in 1945. In doing so, it will reward a pernicious thesis already appropriated by anti-Western campaigners for whom the study of history is a device for forcing pre-specified political conclusions.
The author is Tsuyoshi Hasegawa; his book is called Racing the Enemy. Unlike earlier revisionist historians, Hasegawa does not argue
Source: Jeffrey Berg in the Philadelphia Weekly
Apr 4, 2006
There are obvious places that jump to mind when talking about America's civil rights history: Selma. Montgomery. Greensboro. Birmingham. Detroit. Philly ain't one of 'em.
But Matthew Countryman's new book Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia lends new light to the local battles waged here. The Germantown native, born into a biracial family of civil rights activists, rethinks previous notions about black power, which conventional wisdom has dictated was external an
Source: Roger Cohen in the NYT
Apr 2, 2006
For the director of a shuttered museum in a country at war, the imaginary can be a welcome refuge. Condemned to contemplate his own and his country's fate in great halls emptied of visitors, Donny George paces past showcases of ancient vessels and jars and clay tablets, and he dreams.
In his mind's eye, the museum director sees the grand opening: the courtyard filled with 1,000 guests, succulent lamb and sumptuous dates on tables beneath the palms, a Baghdad chamber quartet playing,
Source: Bruce Craig in AHA Perspectives (April 2006)
Apr 1, 2006
On February 21, 2006, a front-page story in the New York Times reported that for nine years the CIA, U.S. military and intelligence, and other federal agencies have secretly been withdrawing from public access and at times reclassifying thousands of pages of National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) records. NARA quickly responded to the story as well as the requests made several weeks earlier on behalf of independent historian Matthew Aid by the National Security Archive (NSA) in conj
Source: Bill Steigerwald in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Apr 1, 2006
It's no surprise Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes has made so many political friends and enemies. A conservative columnist, counter-terrorism analyst and author or co-author of 18 books, he's a staunch supporter of Israel and a harsh critic of radical Islam.
Praised as an "authoritative commentator on the Middle East" by his allies at the Wall Street Journal, he's been branded "an anti-Islamist extremist" by some Arab-American groups. He's also the founder of th
Source: Mickey Kaus in Slate
Mar 30, 2006
Note to Doris Kearns Goodwin--Ben Domenech Died for Your Sins: Maybe Domenech just wanted to win $50,000 from the New York Historical Society! ... Eric Weiner notes that the wages of plagiarism are good if you have a survival network that includes Walter Isaacson and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. ... For more of th
