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: BBC News
Feb 16, 2006
The reputation of David Irving, the Holocaust-denying historian, was shattered at a libel trial six years ago, to the delight of those disgusted by his revisionism.
But as Europe proudly flexes its freedom of speech credentials in the ongoing row over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, even some of his enemies are uneasy that he now faces up to 10 years in an Austrian jail for his unpalatable historical views.
The British academic will go on trial in Vienna next week o
Source: AScribe
Feb 16, 2006
The author of a long-awaited and widely acclaimed biography on President Abraham Lincoln and his Cabinet has won the 2006 Lincoln Prize, which is endowed by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and administered by Gettysburg College.For her book, "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln," Doris Kearns Goodwin will receive $50,000 and a bronze replica of Augustus Saint-Gaudens life-size bust, "Lincoln the Man." A formal ceremony will take place
Source: NYT
Feb 16, 2006
Robert W. Peterson, whose pioneering history of the Negro leagues, "Only the Ball Was White," recaptured a lost era in baseball history and a rich facet of black life in America, died Saturday at a hospital in Salisbury Township, Pa. Mr. Peterson, who lived in Lower Macungie Township, Pa., was 80. His death was announced by his wife, Peggy, who said he had lung cancer.
When Mr. Peterson's account of black baseball was published by Prentice-Hall in 1970
Source: Press Release--American Historical Association
Feb 16, 2006
On February 13, 2006, the American Historical Association (AHA) sent a letter to the Departments of State and Homeland Security expressing concern over the plight of Dr. Waskar Ari, a member of the Aymara indigenous people of Bolivia and an authority on religious beliefs and political activism among indigenous Bolivians, who has been prevented from taking up his post as assistant professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln because he has been placed on a list of
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 15, 2006
David Irving, the British revisionist historian, revealed last night that he would plead guilty to charges of Holocaust denial when he appeared in a Vienna court next week.Mr Irving, 67, who has been held in an Austrian prison since last November, said he did not consider himself to be a Holocaust denier but had no choice but plead "guilty as charged".
"Under the law I've got no alternative," he told the television channel More4 News.
Source: Press Release -- Washington College
Feb 15, 2006
CHESTERTOWN, MD - Out of a field of nearly 50 books on America's founding
era published during 2005, three finalists have been named today for the
2006 George Washington Book Prize. At $50,000, it is the nation's largest
book prize for early American history. Presented by Washington College, the
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, and George Washington's Mount
Vernon, the prize was launched in 2005 to recognize published works
contributing to a greater understanding of the
Source: Ralph Luker at the HNN blog, Cliopatria
Feb 14, 2006
You can tell that David Horowitz's new book The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America is, as he says,"a gas," just by taking a look at who is included in it. Take George Wolfe, Professor of Musical Performance at Ball State University, for instance. His clean cut, buttoned down demeanor doesn't fool us. He plays the saxopho
Source: Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed
Feb 13, 2006
[Juan Cole is one of the professors David Horowitz singles out for criticism in his new book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.]
... An exact disciplinary breakdown is difficult because many of the professors do interdisciplinary work. But by far, Middle Eastern studies seems to be the most dangerous field to Horowitz, with at least 15 scholars on his list who do work on the subject. Many other professors on the list work in relatively new fields such as e
Source: Brandon Lowrey in the Colorado State Collegian
Feb 10, 2006
Satirical cartoons that sparked deadly riots among Muslims overseas prompted a subtler response at CSU on Wednesday when a professor showed the drawings to his Islamic history class - instead erupting in anger, a man in the class wept.
The three cartoons shown to the about 125-student class included a satirical sketch of the prophet wearing a bomb on top of his head and another that depicted him wielding a sword, surrounded by women. They originated from a Danish newspaper.
Source: Secrecy News, the newsletter written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
Feb 9, 2006
A long-simmering dispute over the role and character of the Congressional Research Service now threatens to boil over in the form of a clash between CRS management and CRS analyst Louis Fisher.
Fisher, a specialist in American government and separation of powers issues, is one of the superstars of the CRS, whose work is widely cited and universally respected by his academic colleagues.
He "is a national treasure, the foremost expert on the constitutional law of the
Source: WSJ
Feb 9, 2006
A dispute involving a researcher at the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service is fueling a debate over whether analysts throughout the government are being muzzled to prevent criticism of Bush administration policies.
Louis Fisher, a 36-year veteran of the agency and an expert on the separation of powers, said his superiors wrongly punished him for giving interviews and publishing scholarly articles under his own name that contained criticism of the White House. Top officials d
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Feb 8, 2006
Sitting at a table in a downtown restaurant here, Charles W. Ingrao is more than 4,500 miles away from Sarajevo. But as he talks with a reporter on a blustery January morning, Mr. Ingrao, a professor of history at Purdue University's main campus, could be sitting at a cafe in Bosnia and Herzegovina's capital. There's coffee and Coca-Cola on the table, and the rapid-fire conversation is thick with Balkan controversy and history. Only the fog of cigarette smoke found in any Bosnian cafe is missing
Source: Alexander H. Joffe at FrontPageMag.com
Feb 6, 2006
[Alexander H. Joffe is director of Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
Cartoon Muhammads are all the rage. As threats and actual violence break out around the world over a Danish newspaper's irreverent de
Source: American Enterprise Online
Feb 4, 2006
David Hackett Fischer, one of our country’s foremost historians, has described his work as “a deep affirmation of American values.” He combines social history with classic narrative, a synthesis that reaches its apex in Paul Revere’s Ride (1994) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington’s Crossing (2004).
Fischer’s ambitious “cultural history of the United States” includes the much-praised Albion’s Seed (1989), which identifies the endu
Source: Seth Perry in the Chronicle of Higher Education
Feb 3, 2006
[Seth Perry is a Ph.D. student in the history of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School.] People often assume I'm a Mormon. I study the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and as a vanilla-white, clean-cut Midwesterner, I fit pretty well into the average person's mental picture of what a Mormon looks like. The response I get when I explain that my interest is purely academic and accidental — I really just stumbled onto the right book at the right time — depends on the person I'm talking to. Both non-Mormons and Mormons are intrigued: the former by the church, the latter by my interest. Non-Mormons often become conspiratorial, ready to get answers to everything they've always wanted to know about the secrets of Mormonism but were afraid to ask. Mormons assume that I have a leaning toward conversion, or at least a desire to celebrate their faith. Rare is the interlocutor who assumes an unvarnished academic interest.
Source: Star Pheonix (Canada)
Feb 2, 2006
Information uncovered by a University of Saskatchewan historian shows an aboriginal youth who was hung for murder was innocent of the crime. Assistant professor Keith Thor Carlson's research is the subject of a documentary entitled The Lynching of Louie Sam that was shown Wednesday night on campus.In 1884, an angry mob of men dressed in their wives' frocks, their faces streaked with aboriginal ceremonial paint, charged across the Canada-U.S. border from Washington to British
Source: Daily Review
Feb 2, 2006
A Univesity of California, Berkeley, art history professor has received a distinguished achievement award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that provides up to $1.5 million so he can further his scholarly pursuits.Timothy Clark, a leading authority on modern art, is one of four humanities scholars chosen for the award. Besides his scholarly work, which includes criticism and research on Gustave Courbet, Edouard Manet and Pablo Picasso, Clark was singled out as an outstand
Source: WKTY (Lexington, KY)
Feb 1, 2006
A University of Kentucky history professor and author has died. Lance Banning was nationally known as an expert on the period of American history from the American Revolution to the U-S Constitution.Banning died yesterday at U-K Hospital in Lexington. He was 64.
Banning was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his book "The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic." He also wrote a book about the conflict betw
Source: Providence Journal
Jan 30, 2006
The state's historic lead paint lawsuit may go to the six-person jury next week, and if it does, the jurors will be asked to believe such widely varying images of the four corporations being sued that it may sound like two trials were held.The state rested its case on Thursday morning. The defendants did the same minutes later, without calling a single witness.
The diverging views after the three-month trial came in legal arguments made by the defendants'
Source: Andrew Cockburn in the Nation
Jan 30, 2006
The FBI was probably tapping Edward Said's phone right up to the day he died in September 2003. A year earlier, when he was already a very sick man, Said was scheduled to speak at an event at the Kopkind Colony's summer session near Guilford, Vermont. The morning of Friday, August 2, the day Said was due to arrive, the colony's John Scagliotti picked up the phone at the colony's old farmhouse and found it was dead. He went to a neighbor to report the fault.
"Within half an hou
