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: Hiram Hover (blogger)
Mar 16, 2006
Has He Even Read the Book? No, and he can’t spell “Bailyn” either. Bradford Short rants about Sean Wilentz receiving the Bancroft for The Rise of American Democracy.
UPDATE: Much Heat, Still No Light: In a comment on Bradford Short's post linked above, Richard Snow, editor of American Heritage, airs an old grudge against Wilentz, who had some unkind things to say about that magazine in TNR five years ago. Okay
Source: Jewish Press
Mar 16, 2006
[Steven Plaut is a professor at Haifa University. His book "The Scout" is available at Amazon.com. He can be contacted at steveneplaut@yahoo.com.]
In the campaign in the UK to organize an academic boycottof Israeli universities, led by the British Association of University Teachers (AUT), it turned out that University of Haifa faculty member Ilan Pappe was the driving force, seeking to create a boycott of his own university. Tha
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
Mar 16, 2006
To the Editor:
Re "Drop Out of the College" (editorial, March 14):
Having written in favor of Electoral College reform since 2000, I, too, would prefer the popular election of the president. But the gimmick you endorse, of having individual states bind their electors to vote for the national popular-vote winner, seems problematic for one basic reason.
What is to stop state legislatures with strong partisan loyalties of their own from abandoning su
Source: NYT
Mar 16, 2006
The American Civil Liberties Union asked a federal court in New York for a preliminary order to stop the administration from banning a prominent Swiss Muslim scholar from speaking in the United States.
The scholar, Tariq Ramadan, has been barred from this country since his visa was revoked in July 2004, a week before he was scheduled to begin a job at the University of Notre Dame. Administration officials explained the action by citing a USA Patriot Act ban of foreigners who "e
Source: NYT
Mar 15, 2006
Mr. Swanson, a constitutional law expert at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research institute, has satisfied his decades-long fixation [with the assassination of Lincoln he read about as a boy in a partial newspaper clipping] — by finishing the story himself. His book, "Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer," was published last month by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, just in time for Lincoln's (and Mr. Swanson's) birthday.
The author's pass
Source: Inside Higher Education
Mar 15, 2006
Columbia University on Tuesday announced the 2006 winners of the Bancroft Prizes — one of the top honors in the field of history. The winners are Erskine Clarke, a professor of American religious history at Columbia Theological Seminary, in Georgia, for Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (Yale University Press); Odd Arne Westad, a professor of history at the London School of Economics and Political Science, for The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Time (Cambridge U
Source: Peter Gottschalk in an email circulating on the Internet
Mar 13, 2006
[Peter Gottschalk is Associate Professor, Wesleyan University.]
Wikipedia.org has been usurped to impugn specific scholars and Hindu
studies in the US in general, omitting the far larger context of the
work by both individuals and the scholarly community. In particular,
Wikipedia's entry on Wendy Doniger defines and rejects her work almost
entirely within a frame of hurt Hindu sensibilities, an entry on Jeff
Kripal defines him only in regard to allegations and controversy
surr
Source: WaPo
Mar 13, 2006
Donelson Hoopes, 73, a museum official and art historian who was a leading authority on 19th-century American painting, died Feb. 22 at a hospital in Bangor, Maine, from the effects of a stroke. He lived in Steuben, Maine.Mr. Hoopes, the author of more than a dozen books, worked at museums across the country and was the curator of exhibitions and collections at the Corcoran Gallery of Art from 1962 until 1964, when the Corcoran was one of the two or three most prominent muse
Source: Inside Higher Education
Mar 13, 2006
Miguel Tinker-Salas, a professor of Latin American history at Pomona College, had two unexpected guests during his office hours on Tuesday.
Mixed in with the line of about five students were two detectives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, one of whom, according to a business card he gave Tinker-Salas, works for the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a Federal Bureau of Investigation collaboration with local detectives. According to Tinker-Salas, the detectives said they wa
Source: Deborah Solomon interview in the NYT Magazine
Mar 12, 2006
Q: As a staunch neoconservative and the author of a new feminism-bashing book called ''Manliness,'' how are you treated by your fellow government professors at Harvard? Look, if I only consorted with conservatives, I would be by myself all the time.
So your generally left-leaning colleagues are willing to talk to you? People listen to me, but they don't pay attention to what I say. I should punch them out, but I don't.
In your latest book, you bemoan the disappearance
Source: 60 Minutes
Mar 12, 2006
[H.R.McMaster is the author of, Dereliction of Duty.]
This is a story about an entire city that was taken over by al Qaeda. It's called Tal Afar and about 200,000 people who live there became prisoners in their own homes when terrorists took control and turned it into their town.
They used Tal Afar as a base to train insurgents and launch attacks around Iraq. Last September, U.S. and Iraqi forces set out to recapture Tal Afar, and as Lara Logan reports, the Bush admini
Source: Trenton Times
Mar 12, 2006
These are not the best of times for liberals, but Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz cautions those pessimists who fear that conservatives are about to make good on their crusade to erase more than half a century of progressive reforms that date back to FDR's New Deal.
Wilentz, who is director of Princeton's Program in American Studies, agrees that President Bush has had more success in turning back the liberal agendas of the past than previous conservative Republican pres
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 10, 2006
Robin D.G. Kelley, the well-known African-American studies scholar, is not getting a raise or any other perks when he leaves Columbia University for the University of Southern California this summer. So why is he bailing out on the Ivy League?
Mr. Kelley says Columbia's history department shunned him — forcing him to take an appointment in anthropology when he joined the faculty in 2003.
"I'm sort of tired of being at an institution where my own department doesn't
Source: National Coalition for History
Mar 10, 2006
The National History Center launches the first Congressional seminar of the second session of Congress this Monday 13 March from 4-6 pm in the Senate Russell Building in Washington D.C. with presentations by Eric Foner of Columbia University and John Hope Franklin of Duke University. Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture will moderate the session titled,"Revisting Race and Reconstruction: What is the Federal Government Role?"
The semi
Source: Lisa Hirschmann in the Columbia Spectator
Mar 9, 2006
DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein addressed Columbians in Roone Arledge Auditorium Wednesday night on what he deemed a "contrived and fabricated controversy" surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Hundreds of students, professors, administrators, and non-affiliates poured into the auditorium to hear the controversial author's speech, titled "Israel and Palestine: Misuse of Anti-Semitism, Abuse of History." The event was sponsored by a
Source: Email circulating on the Internet
Mar 9, 2006
[Miguel Tinker-Salas is Arango Professor in Latin American History and Professor of History and Chicano/a Studies at Pomona College.]
Estimado/as Colegas,
I write to inform you that yesterday during my
office hours (Tuesday 2:30-4:30) I was visited by
two agents of the LA County Sherrifs/FBI Joint Task
Force on Terrorism (JTFT).
The arrived at about 2:40-2:45 pm sat out side my office
while attended to a students, and then asked to see me.
They had with them a
Source: Benjamin Balint in the WSJ
Mar 9, 2006
... Walter Laqueur arrived in Jerusalem in 1938 as a 17-year-old refugee from Nazi Germany, stayed until the mid-1950s and has made frequent visits ever since. As an eminent historian whose many works include "A History of Zionism" (1987), he is familiar with what he calls the "surfeit of history" in a city that has known innumerable desecrations, conquests and sieges in the 30 centuries since David made it his capital.
But in "Dying for Jerusalem," Mr. Laque
Source: Australian
Mar 9, 2006
AUSTRALIAN historian Henry Reynolds has defended the doctrine of terra nullius, insisting that while the High Court did not rely on his view of white settlement for its Mabo decision, it nonetheless endorsed the controversial theory.
Under attack from dissident historian Michael Connor, who published his book The Invention of Terra Nullius in December, Professor Reynolds maintains British settlers never recognised the property rights of Aborigines.
''The one, utterly u
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Mar 7, 2006
Academic freedom is facing its most serious threats since the McCarthy era, according to essays in Academic Freedom After September 11, published this month by Zone Books. Essays in the book — which come from scholars such as Joel Beinin, Judith Butler and Robert Post — both focus on current issues and offer a historical perspective. Beshara Doumani, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley who edited the volume, recently responded to questions about its themes.
Source: Irish Examiner
Mar 7, 2006
Right-wing British historian David Irving, who was convicted by an Austrian court of denying the Holocaust, has been barred from speaking with the press, a court spokeswoman said today.Since a Vienna state court found Irving guilty last month and sentenced him to three years in prison, he has spoken to several news organisations.
Alexandra Mathes, spokeswoman for the court, said it was unusual for a judge to grant reporters the right to interview a convict in th
